BINGO! PROBLEM-SOLVING!

Design is a solution-oriented practice. As researcher Richard Buchanan suggests, design often deals with wicked problems, problems that are difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. One of the first move designer makes doing her job is to find a way to identify wicked problems and to re-deploy them conveniently into a sum of normal problems, ie. problems that proper design could fix.

Here’s an example of a wicked problem : you have to design a bench for a public park ; it has to be confortable and ergonomic so users, and particularly elders, can use them with no effort during a long time span; it has to properly evacuate the rain so it can be shortly back in use after a shower; still it also has to be dissuasive to homeless so one should not be able to lie properly on it.
This is just the technical aspect of the wicked problem, I’m not even mentioning its ethical dimension. Anyhow, the designer will have to reformulate inherent paradoxes in the project in order to neutralize them, and work.

But let’s face it : not only we can’t reduce the sum of a society’s difficulties to problems awaiting their solution, but we should not do it.
The destiny of a society, of a group of people, whether it’s you and the people living in your street, the hundreds of refugees who are rotting in a greek camp or the whole humanity facing an ecological disaster has nothing to do with a problem-solution dynamics.
It’s a matter of visions and choices.
When you start to reduce life to a series of problems to be solved, you might end up with sinister « final solutions ».

Thus, poverty isn’t a design problem. Exclusion isn’t a design problem. Gender inequality isn’t a design problem. Environmental crisis isn’t a design problems. That doesn’t mean we’re helpless, but designers should do what designers can do, and this means design.

As the italian designer Ettore Sottsass wrote in 1973, « I refuse to be manipulated with jargon or conditioned by words, words, words. I wish that they would use words so near the words that I use every day that they would have some meaning for what I’m doing and not for what I might do.
What I’m saying is that if one wants to be a designer he must do a designer’s work, and his more or less liberating choices can be made practicing design, and put into his design.
These choices cannot be made by engaging in politics, by becoming one of those who use the jargon and do nothing but talk, talk, talk. »