Design topics — 1x2, Problem-framing: praise for the old but gold story of interpretation
Drawing on the Intro of this design column, I cannot overlook the idea that all human activities are connected because we are all used to experiencing (consciously or not) our own design cognition. In this context, thanks to our interpretative capacity, we apply our knowledge to solve problems and achieve our goals and desires. In everyday life and at work, within that design dimension, we routinely frame problems. The lesson from psychology is that we make sense of our experiences and accordingly build potential rules of action that may comply with our previsions. In this multilayered activity, we see that “sensemaking” and “will-giving” mix together. The achievement of a consistent and effective problem-framing, or else the “mixing” of meanings, feelings and concrete actions, may affect the rest of our future developments (unless you want to take a blind flight). Indeed, there is no way to avoid interpretation: it would mean that our judgment is deliberately suspended or that our brain is affected by (really severe) damages. In point of fact, there is no meaning acquisition without interpretation. Sensemaking is a condition sine qua non the understanding of problems and learning new information can occur. We face a situation, learn the lesson and decide what to change on our inner models accordingly. This process occurs whenever we want to gain clarity, find requirements, look for the correct answer, or set goals. And this is itself a problem on account of the multiple semantic possibilities of what we are experiencing. Problem-framing is as complex as reality since it moves from ontology to epistemology to methodology. Although we think we are inherently rational, we live by that multi-sensorial metaphor, constantly testing the aptness of our theories. We sort out and strain “designedly” the relations between our purposes, theories and behaviours.
We are now walking through a threshold where artificiality is evolving at speed never seen before. Indeed, we are conceiving new dialectics within such a complex world, constantly in the making through terabytes of data and will increasingly need new language domains. So if we look at today’s problems, it becomes apparent that we are dealing with several new categories. Contemporary issues, to some extent, are unknown to us. Even when they may appear concise and distinct, we are confronted with an outburst of strictly interwoven problems as soon as we disclose them. Well, this may be the time to fish out that Schön-mantra, or rather to design a new framework for our reflections and choices. We should figure out further research questions to give new meanings to that daedalus of data. Our ability to assign meaning to our sensations, i.e., our incremental sensorial literacy, is the “old-but-gold” way to fill in the gaps of the unknown. Moreover, patience and critical awareness are needed to shed new light on obscure, invisible and intangible experiential components that we still do not grasp. As underpinned by the Italian semiotician Salvatore Zingale: “the hidden sense of things” and “the possible sense of solution”. Therefore, nurturing and increasing the ability to deepen human experience is one of the best assets in any kind of organization (also, it is worthwhile betting on human behaviour equipped with sound knowledge). It is essential to focus on problem-framing and building the right knowledge capital against any dogmatic process that leads us quickly to find solutions. The more the reconstruction of the “story” (in the hermeneutic sense) of a problem is misleading, the more we will incur potential misunderstandings of its whole (thus prototyping solutions to a wrong problem). Indeed, as significantly explained by psychologist George Kelly: “All our current perceptions are open to discussion and reconsideration (…) even the most obvious events of everyday life could be shown to be totally transformed if we were sufficiently inventive to build them in a different way.”
By relying on our interpretative ability, we try to understand problems in all their nuances. We try to grasp their essence, performance, story and languages. This is also the very first deliberate activity we do within our research, as it is crucial in giving purpose and direction to the fuzzy and messy frontends of our lives. Thus, human beings can design their own habitat from a sensible point of view. The dialectic we establish with every kind of artefact (both abstract and concrete) we relate to can be conceived as a recursive and unstoppable loop that assigns meanings and, on that basis, gives us new perspectives for further actions. And the meanings are seldom found by chance: they must be found, understood and constructed. In this respect, design practices are succeeding through time, especially service design within the business context. This is why it attracted practitioners out of offices to engage with real contexts or a melting pot of information. Beyond rational and analytical auto-sufficiency of thought, design has matured a set of tools and activities that better serve within the environment, among people, knowledge and information, just the interpretation of problem (activity previously segregated between few office walls). Of course, the result is thicker and more complex, but it is the broadest and most multifaceted human capital, which we can have a comparison with. So design activities really improve the passage from the taking-out representation of reality to the in-taking impressions of it. A vigilant evolution which has followed the new and growing criticism ‒ both pragmatic and constructivist‒ and has renewed its sensorial capacity in the shift from objects to systems. This personal generative inquiry was the first topic of this column.
Contemporary problems do not belong to our tech rationale-oriented culture anymore, which is another reason why we need new methods to grasp and understand reality. We overcame the grapes of wrath and reached a high level of production, automation, engineering and management sciences. Innovation, which is at the centre of our speculation, is the outcome of our interpretation. First, we framed it as problem-solving, then as ideation. Still, within a hyperstoric world, those frameworks are not working at their best in making sense of our new and potential behaviours, activities and perspectives. These approaches do not “think” anymore. The change that is occurring appears to be cultural rather than technical. How to “produce” new forms of humanity within such a world? How to manage, synthesize and take a stance on such an amount of data? We must refine our interpretative categories (and we may have to cut out our class consciousness). This is the time (especially for designers) to reflect on how we conceive people and how we see reality. Today’s problems (to name a few) are i) political, since capitalism (at its rampant level) appears not to look after a weak and uncertain democracy and is actually generating only inequalities; ii) environmental, on account of climate change and an internal conflict and disagreement between scientists, but also considering that economy bases its prosperity on the competition for planet resources ‒ as Tim Jackson put it: “we need to decide if to crash the system or crash the planet”; iii) social, as morbidity related to our addiction to technology are increasing, formatting and amplifying bodies, emotions and thoughts, and this will be probably burdening our future health system (already heavily scourged and privatized). The very nature of such problems gives us awareness of being far from any view of human beings in reductionist and mechanistic terms. Humanities, in this historical phase, play a pivotal role. In 2016, the anthropologist and entrepreneur Christian Madsbjerg wrote a fantastic book called Sensemaking, which thoroughly analyses the power of humanistic disciplines while emphasizing with utmost strength the complexity and non-linearity of human nature.
In light of such a tangled landscape, challenges are open-ended and unstructured. Understanding today’s oft-claimed “why” requires us to rethink our conceptual logic, starting straight from the aims analysis that problems give us. Therein, people have to compare their theories, meanings and beliefs. Within designing, we need to refine our understanding of reality in terms of constraints and requirements, as these are the limits concretely posed by reality. The philosopher Luciano Floridi wrote: “the most influential sciences and intellectual endeavours of our time (…) do not just study their systems, they mainly build and modify them. The more the sciences shifts from a mimetic to a poietic approach to the world the more we shall need a logic of design”. Finally, understanding problems may be more straightforward in physics, natural or technological sciences, but what about political and social issues? What about the aforementioned current turns? It is not enough to analyze and describe reality. Now, as a hermeneutic maxim says, we must constructively interpret it. And this is the most potent human force to access and influence the world, irreducible to any scientific-positive method. We know very well the impact of design in this context. Here facts and problems are tough to frame and decipher. The amount of different data is complex, and most are not “objective” or countable. And it is difficult to correctly and consistently gather essential information, distinguishing it from collateral ones. Sometimes no sufficient evidence is available, and, as remember us researcher and professor Roberto Verganti, meanings may be “outlandish” from the reality we are immersed in. Interpretation needs interests and resources from organizations, as well as people’s inclination to reboot their frameworks since meanings are constructed by human cultural systems. And, in this regard, the manifold nature of humankind stands out majestically, one we must embrace patiently to let it breathe rather than suffocate.
