Improvising
Design

Because wicked problems don’t solve themselves …

We talk about design as if it were fixed: as if there were one best way to design everything. We celebrate designers who produce especially elegant or usable artifacts as if they were possessed of supernatural powers. Yet we can observe how the users of our designs work – so why does design fail so often?

Most complex designs involve improvisation. You start with what you know, then try out ideas until you find something that works. The problem with design is – as the Princess said – you have to kiss an awful lot of frogs to get a Prince. As designers succeed or fail at successive designs, they gain experiential knowledge, that allows them to assess new situations quickly and to understand which design elements will work or fail in that situation.

The problem comes when a designer is faced with a novel or unusual situation. Novice designers encounter this situation a great deal. Designers are taught a repertoire of designs-that-works: patterns that fit specific circumstances and uses. Experienced designers understand that design is a social problem. They need to investigate what people want to do, and how they need to work, before they can define the problem and select designs that will work in these circumstances. Novice designers treat each design as technology configuration. They follow rules and treat design as an algorithm, where you just program in the right bits. They treat human-activity as system use, instead of socially-situated work.

Organizational problems are wicked problems: tangles of interrelated, subjective problems that are define differently, depending who you ask. Nobody understands the “big picture” of how an organization works – people just understand how the part they work in operates. So your job, as a designer, is to piece the puzzle together, understand how the various parts interact, then improvise and revise the design until you get something that everyone can live with.