Tackling wicked problems => Design Thinking — Day 8
1.0 Recap
Yesterday I studied for a little bit about why UX is important, and I thought I was going to continue with it. But I found myself going back to design thinking because I super love that aspect of design.
Bear with me 🙈. I will be doing both courses(i.e Design Thinking and User Experience) interchangeably.
2.0 Five ways of tackling wicked problems
Today I looked at ways of tackling wicked problems. One of my posts last week talked about what makes a problem wicked. You can catch up here.
We described Wicked Problem as a complex problem which has no formula to solving it. In order to tackle these problems, we need to look at it in a systematic way using Agile Methodologies.
Wicked Problem => Systems Thinking + Agile Methodologies
2.1 System Thinking
System thinking is more about breaking down the problem into nodes or chunks of information in order to allow us to understand the problem. The problem is broken down into components such as people, concept, and these components have connections and relationships.
A popular example used to illustrate System Thinking is toasting a bread.
The components or nodes from the illustration are the bread, oven, plates. While the connections are the links from one process to another.
2.2 Agile Methodologies
Agile methodology simply means improving solution to a problem through collaboration, iterating design, testing the design and gathering users feedback.
The five ways of tackling wicked problems are:
- Breaking down the problem into nodes => This is more about Systems Thinking, looking at the components that make up the problem and the connections and relationships between these nodes.
- Visualise the information by sketching => I do more sketching and fewer texts. Visualising the problem makes it super easy to understand it.
- Collaborate with your team => This is part of the agile methodology process. It allows for a different perspective when viewing the problem.
- Release solution quickly to gather continuous feedback => There is no perfect solution. You improve the solution based on the feedback you get from users and stakeholders.
- Iterate => This means constantly changing the previous design based on feedback.
3.0 Conclusion
Tomorrow, I’m going to describe a wicked problem, which is a societal problem being experienced in the educational sector.
The best way to learn is by asking questions and letting people know how you understand the topic. Feel free to leave a comment, we will definitely learn from it
