Isn’t change exciting!

Change is good. Design is all about change; bringing something into the world that didn’t exist before; changing from an undesirable to a desirable state of affairs; improvement; progress! And now we are even Changing the Change!

I can hardly contain myself with excitement, but I’ll try.

In a day from now a conference starts in Torino, Italy called Changing the Change. It’s an international meeting of people involved in design research. I would have loved to be there but alas my proposal for a paper was not accepted. Hardly surprising for two good reasons: my proposal was cobbled together just after I came out of hospital having had half my liver removed, so I was not at my most lucid; also I suspect that I am regarded as coming from the dark side, especially with the title I gave my proposed paper:

Changing from panacea to prosthesis:
methods and thinking for designing IN the world

Doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? The implication is clear. Far from being the new frontier of bold new visions, leading to a better world, my vision of designing is much humbler, a sort of Mr Fix It, a handyman, a travelling tinker.

As I see it, the job of a designer is at worst to paper over the crack in the system, and at best to provide a temporary prosthesis for a broken bit of the world. A long way from the vision splendid and the excitement of Changing the Change.

There is no doubt that there is much in our world that many of us would like to change. Design comes at the end of a long line of attempts to do so: philosophy, religion, politics, war, science, management and a few others have all been championed at one time or another as the agents of change, ushering in a new era and a better world. Will design work better?

Walter Benjamin once observed:

There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. (Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p 248)

Design could easily be the new barbarism. But with a little care it might not be, and might make a genuine, if modest, contribution to a better world. To achieve it, designers need to do something that they don’t do now: benchmarking.

Benchmarking is that part of the design process where you ask how an existing system is performing against agreed performance requirements set at the scoping stage of the design process. Putting the matter simply, if you change something and then claim that the change is an improvement, you need to have some before and after measurements.
As I wrote in one of our case histories:

Much design work…… is redesign rather than design from scratch. An important part of redesign is to ask: where are we right now? what is the current performance of this design? what is happening in the world now which we don’t want to happen, or we’d like to change? where do we want to go? what do we want to achieve here? It doesn’t matter if we change our mind at some point, but if we don’t know where we currently are and where we want to go, we won’t know when we’ve arrived.
Often in design projects the urge to get ahead and redevelop doesn’t leave space for actually asking those questions. But benchmarking is an essential stage…. [I]t’s only after one has done the scoping and benchmarking that one is in a position to write the design brief at all. Also, there is a sense in which all design activity is generative; that is, it leads to outcomes that none of us foresee-it opens things up and provides new possibilities. This is why benchmarks are so important-they guide us through the processes and possibilities: we know we’ve got there if we know where we were going to begin with, and we’ll know if we change direction because we knew where we started from.
As well, benchmarks make great before-and-after politically potent stories: ‘When we started it was like this, but look at it now-it’s great’. You can only do this if you benchmark.

So I’m all in favour of change, even Changing the Change. But we need to know what we are changing from. Moreover, we should not assume that everything done up till now has been wrong and that only radical transformation or revolution can solve our current ‘problems’. Unless we look carefully at what we are doing now before making change, we might throw out some good bits.

I suspect that many designers, like the practioners in other disciplines that have gone before, are excited by change for the sake of change, believing, without any evidence, that the changes they make will make all the difference. I prefer to proceed more carefully even if it means being a tinker rather than a master of the universe. But it would have been nice to be in Torino to say so. I hope someone does.

It’s just life!

Isn’t the phrase ‘wicked problems’ a good one? Putting on my best streetwise accent, I can hear myself say “Wicked, man!” But things are not as they may seem.

The academics who invented the term did not have wicked thoughts, let alone thoughts about wicked problems (at least not in the reputable academic publications in which they developed the idea). It’s all much more innocent. In the context in which the idea was first written about—a discussion of planning theory—wicked was not contrasted with good. No naughtiness was anywhere in sight. The term wicked was contrasted with tame.

I suspect that if people knew that in the esoteric context of planning theory, the opposite of ‘wicked’ was ‘tame’ then we would have all been spared the endless repetition of the wicked problem problem. But, that’s the way it is.

It is now fashionable for organizations to have wicked problems. Indeed, if your organisation doesn’t have one, you might as well shut up shop. Without a wicked problem you cannot play with the other fashionable management toys of design thinking and innovation. You are an organisational dinosaur, doomed to extinction, or worse: doing what you do now, only possibly a little better. How dull, and not a bit wicked.

But the whole thing is a sham The world is not full of problems waiting to be solved, wicked or otherwise. There is just life and the messy uncertain business of coping with it.

Horste Rittel and Melvin Webber, the men who coined the phrase ‘wicked problems’, suggested there were 10 defining characteristics of wicked problems. I present them below, substituting ‘life’ for ‘wicked problem’ and ‘person’ for ‘planner’, With some minor grammatical and contextual adaptations, you will see that there is a good fit.

• 1. There is no definitive formulation of life.
• 2. Life has no stopping rule [except death or suicide].
• 3. Life is not true-or-false, just better or worse.
• 4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a successful or unsuccessful life.
• 5. Every life is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to start again, every life counts significantly.
• 6. Life does not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential outcomes, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into life’s plan.
• 7. Every life is essentially unique.
• 8. Every life can be considered to be a consequence of another life.
• 9. The existence of a discrepancy in life can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of what we do.
• 10. A person has no right to be wrong. People are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate

It’s because Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber are offering us a recognisable description of our own daily struggle, not something in the least esoteric, that the idea of wicked problems resonates so well with many of us.

But how can I claim that there are no problems? Imagine an empty universe with no life, just the movement and occasional collision of galaxies, stars, planets, moons and comets. Are there problems in this lifeless universe? No, it just is. Now imagine a world with just animals, plants, microbes and stuff. Where are the problems? There are none.

It’s only when we think of the world we live in, the world of people, that we can talk about problems. Problems are a human invention. Problems are the bits of life that we don’t like and think we might be able to change. If we believe we cannot change things, or do not want to change them, we don’t have any problems.

So calling something a problem is a very human thing to do. As such it is subject to all the vagaries of humanity.

Consider the ‘problem’ of global warming. Today’s best scientific opinion says that global warming is a fact. It is measurable. It is happening. The scientific opinion also says that we—people—are the cause of it. We could just shrug our shoulders and do nothing, put up with the coming apocalypse, but that is not the human way. No, we call global warming a problem and then feel compelled to act, to solve the problem. Caught up in the moral fervor of our time, some people think that to do nothing would be wicked. Would that make the wicked a wicked problem? What a wicked suggestion!

Reference

Rittel, Horst, and Melvin Webber; “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” pp. 155-169, Policy Sciences, Vol. 4, Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Inc., Amsterdam, 1973.