RETHINKING WICKED

DESIGN FOR COMPLEXITY / Book Chapter in Progress

RETHINKING WICKED / Part 1 of 2

Making Sense of Everyday Complexity / In-Between Space

"Undertaking this book provided our authorship team with an opportunity to question and rethink various aspects of Design for Complexity as a construction in progress. We did not want to become entangled in boiling the ocean but we could see several legacy design issues that could use some attention. 

One of the wildly popular terms in the design community that got itself stuck to the notion of rising complexity of problems was the term “Wicked Problem”, that was tabled from the direction of Berkley by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973. Some of our readers will know, that was “Era 6” on the Innovation Process Models Timeline that we included in our first book; Innovation Methods Mapping.

Without getting into whether or not there was an equally adventuresome method attached to the bold term Wicked Problems, it was the terminology that stuck and has since been applied to zillions of problems, many of which did not, do not, fit the original 10 point definition *(see below). From a practice perspective, one of our small aha moments that occurred along the way in this book project, was realization that there was, there is, something a little odd, something missing from the two dimensional Wicked/Tame construct, created originally in the context of city planning."

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