The Design Wisdom Project
How to help designers develop their mental models
Tanner Christensen is the Head of Design at Gem. Yesterday he shared an article about Ambiguous Design Problems on Linkedin. In the past several months, I read many similar articles which call a new approach for growing designers’ design wisdom.
The challenge is well described by Tanner Christensen in his article. See the following highlight:
How do you approach a problem that has no definition, not even a hypothesis?
As product designers grow in their careers we are tasked with taking on more complex and ambiguous problems. We find ourselves in situations where our job is to help others envision and explore a complex and often poorly defined landscape.
The task of figuring out what hasn’t been figured out already can be daunting, even debilitating, for designers.
Thankfully the path through ambiguity is clear once you do one thing. As Lewis Carroll famously wrote in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
There are many ways to grow a designer’s wisdom in dealing with wicked problems. For example, some designers move from design thinking to system thinking, even Complex Adaptive Systems.
