Wicked Problems

Written for Transition Design, taught at Carnegie Mellon University by Terry Irwin and Gideon Kossoff

Question: How would you, as designers, facilitate conversation around wicked problems with individuals who are not familiar with the term? Do they have their own term for “wicked problems”?

Talk to one person outside of the design school (mom, friend, etc.) and get their perspective on this topic to help answer the question.

Answer:

I think most people nowadays are familiar with the concept of the interconnectedness of all things, which provides an easy starting point when talking about wicked problems. There are a lot of useful and relevant metaphors, such as global markets and climate change, or even the imagery of a drop of food coloring permeating through a glass of water until all ‘molecules’ are transformed. Many people are also familiar with the ineffectiveness of “bandage” solutions that address symptoms, but not the underlying cause.

When explaining the concept of wicked problems to family, I use this idea of interconnectedness to convey the complex network of inputs/triggers that makes addressing wicked problems so difficult. My twin sister is a pharmacist in a hospital, and in complicated cases, they do have to consider the interactions of different drugs if a patient is on several different medications. In some cases one drug can’t be used because it may exacerbate another, pre-existing condition, and in that case some creative solutions need to be found. However, as treatments are in most cases administered to treat acute symptoms of chronic problems (usually attributed to poor lifestyle choices, which are not adequately addressed), I don’t feel that pharmacists take the entire body as a system into consideration enough. This is most obvious in pharmaceutical ads for medicines that may temporarily treat insomnia, for example, but have several, much more harmful side effects.

Another sister of mine is a lawyer, and I think an interesting concept in the law is that of legal precedent. Precedent in the law implies that when judges make decisions in one case, that judgment/decision establishes a principle that could potentially be used to formulate the argument/judgment for another case, even if several years later. I think this concept is very useful in that it forces lawyers/judges to be future-thinking, to think about the entire justice system as a whole, to acknowledge that their one decision could potentially have a much larger impact (positive or negative), and to recognize the weightiness of their decisions. It therefore encourages those in the legal profession to make decisions with great wisdom and foresight. Parallels between the law and transition design can be drawn in that that, when solving wicked problems, decisions once made are very difficult to reverse. Also, design interventions have far-reaching impacts, and so that same level of wisdom and foresight is as crucial in design as in the law.