Design Problems and Design Paradoxes

Introduction The problem-solving literature that arose in the 1960s and 1970s in the promising and exciting field of artificial intelligence has had a profound impact on Design Methodology. The introduction of these theories in Design Methodology, at the start of the 1970s, helped to systemize the models and methods of design existing then, and link them to models of problem solving in other fields. There were high hopes that the very nature of design could be captured in a description that was based upon considering design the solution to “ill-structured problems.” Although there have been many developments since then, the original work on problem solving and the nature of ill-structured problems, written by Herbert Simon, still looms large over the field of design methodology. The rational problem-solving paradigm, based on the conceptual framework that Simon introduced, is still a dominant paradigm in the field.1 Design models and methods have been developed within this paradigm; the conceptual framework of rational problem solving has become the normal “language” of thinking and talking about design. There also have been many critiques of Simon’s problem-solving approach and its applicability to the field of design, and many of the original statements in the problem-solving theory that deal with design have since been qualified and refined. However, these critiques have not produced a fundamentally different alternative to the conceptual framework. In this piece, we will revisit the basic assumptions behind Simon’s approach to design, notably the central concept of “illstructured problem,” and introduce some ideas that could lead to an alternative conceptual framework for thinking about design problems. First, we will revisit the original work by Simon at considerable length, and unearth the assumptions that underlie the conceptual framework that Simon uses to describe ill-structured problems. Then we will deal with some more recent developments within the problem-solving framework, and discuss some of the critiques on the rational problem-solving approach to design—again concentrating on the central notion of ill-structured problems. We will use this critique to propose a fledgling framework of alternative concepts that could be used to augment our understanding of the nature of 1 C.H. Dorst, Describing Design: A Comparison of Paradigms (thesis TUDelft, 1997).