Can Design and Designers “Solve the problem”?
Every where around I hear “ProblemSolver”
What does it mean exactly?
I think people use the term ‘solution’ far too often without thinking about what it really means. Unless you work in a mathematical field with a defined set of parameters, you’re probably not solving much at all.
Being a designer, and most of us in the design industry proclaim ourselves to be ‘problem solvers.’ In fact, we use the term liberally. New mocks for a mobile app? They’re each presented as ‘solutions.’ Developed a new product? The common claim is that it ‘solves a problem.’
I have seen many designers talking about ‘designers-are-problem-solvers’. But over time, I’ve come to realize that this a neutral term for our process and our end products. To say something is a solution means that something has addressed a problem completely. It means that the product or service is final. It’s 100% complete.
An Important Issue
So why do I feel the need to bring this up?
This Year, 2020 has taken a big toll on everyones life and meanwhile I see many designers proclaiming to “solve-the-problem”
But are they really solving it?
Are we really solving it?
I think it’s an important issue for anyone working with problems, especially designers. Defining the outcome accurately sets more reasonable expectations for our work. Framing our design work as a response instead of a solution is important for all involved. It’s critical for us designers to know our own process, it’s relevant for the people that we design with, and in the end, it’s significant for those who will interact with what we create.
So if designers don’t ‘solve problems,’ then what do I believe we actually do? The short answer: we change things, responding to problems.
The Long answer:
Problems Can Be “Wicked”
Design is about working within problems. The discipline deals with more straightforward problems (composing a page layout) and more complex ones (developing a new transportation system). But to universally define design as ‘problem solving’ is a bit hasty.
While doing my study on same, I read about Design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber wrote about problems at length in their classic strategy piece Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. In this work, they introduced the idea of wicked problems, those which deal with social, economic, and environmental issues so complex and unpredictable that they can’t really be defined properly. With wicked problems, Rittel and Webber propose that a solution is almost circular to the problem itself:
“To find the problem is thus the same as finding the solution; the problem cannot be defined until the solution has been found.”
This idea has radical consequences for the term ‘solution.’ It means that we can’t predict the depth and breadth of the problem space until we’ve exhausted all of our potential responses and found the one that works. Think about it… you’d need to design all possible forms of your artifact to fully understand the problem itself. Seems pretty unrealistic.
Most designers don’t deal with the complexity of wicked problems on a daily basis.
What Designers Actually Do
The realization that there may not be one fail-safe solution doesn’t mean we should stop responding to problems. It means we need to think about what we’re really doing when we design. Sure, we’re addressing problems, but there’s more to it than that.
“To design is no longer to increase the stability of the man-made world: it is to alter, for good or ill, things that determine the course of its development.”
That’s a lot of pressure. But would we designers have it any other way? The changes we deem necessary to make are often a result of problems that exist within our world’s larger system. In essence, the ‘design as change’definition is just a more realistic version of the ‘design as problem-solving’ argument.
