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Insight
Published in Wanda Grimsgaard, Design and Strategy, 2023
A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of its complex, interconnected and contradictory nature, such as environmental crisis. By being concerned with the human aspect, designers are often confronted with the so-called wicked problems. Typical of wicked problems is that they are characterised by a high level of complexity, combined with a high degree of uncertainty and often attracting stakeholders with radically different world views. Such problems can have consequences that are hard to imagine and demanding to put an end to in the form of a single solution (DRLab) 24 According to Wikipedia classic examples of wicked problems include economic, environmental, and political issues. A problem whose solution requires a great number of people to change their mindsets and behaviour is likely to be a wicked problem. These include global climate change, natural hazards, healthcare, the AIDS epidemic, pandemic influenza, international drug trafficking, nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, waste and social injustice.
Applying Design Thinking Principles on Major Infrastructure Projects
Published in Edward Ochieng, Tarila Zuofa, Sulafa Badi, Routledge Handbook of Planning and Management of Global Strategic Infrastructure Projects, 2020
Major infrastructure projects are generally high profile, incredibly expensive and time-consuming. Mistakes in projects can alienate stakeholders, waste resources and create a lack of confidence in other major projects. Problem-solving and decision-making are key tenets of managing major infrastructure projects. Major infrastructure projects can impact the economy, the environment, benefit society as a whole and contribute to sustainable living. Successful infrastructure project outcomes, therefore, are not limited to the traditional outcomes of a physical end product which is working, functional and well designed; it must provide value and work well for the environment and those that use it. This requires collaboration with stakeholders, including previously siloed departments, to solve what is termed “wicked problems.” Wicked problems are at the heart of major infrastructure projects today, as goals of expediency and budget, maximizing performance or efficiency while minimizing costs and meeting a desired level of service. They are replaced by the domain of complexity, where rapidly changing environments and fragmentation of goals require fundamentally new approaches (Chester and Allenby, 2019). This chapter looks at how to address the problems with major infrastructure projects, the multiple stakeholders involved and the complex nature of outputs in terms of building, climate, people and value through two separate yet in some ways aligned processes: design thinking and systems thinking.
Introduction
Published in William Sarni, Digital Water, 2021
Several years ago, Tom Higley, a friend, entrepreneur, and founder of 10.10.101 and XGENESIS2 asked me if water was a “wicked problem.” I assumed he was asking whether the “water crisis” (not a term I care for but will use it for simplicity’s sake) was a difficult challenge to solve. What I didn’t realize was that “wicked problems” actually have a specific definition – one that water fits perfectly within. For me, the most important takeaway from understanding “wicked problems” is that all stakeholders must be engaged in solving these problems as they have unique capabilities and attributes to contribute. For example, entrepreneurs have speed and focus, and the public sector has size and scale (Figure 0.1).
Water governance and system coordination across diverse risk-management cultures
Published in Water International, 2022
Brendan Bromwich, Damian Crilly, Jyoti Banerjee
The third relevant theoretical construct is the dichotomy of wicked and tame problems. A wicked problem is one that cannot be easily defined, and cannot be resolved by a single analytical approach. By contrast, a tame problem can be defined and resolved. The optimization of an engineering problem such as a pipeline design is a tame problem – the variables of cost, energy and flow can be defined and an optimal solution defined. Conversely, the optimization of a river catchment is a wicked problem, in which optimizing one element (say, water resources) may have complex links with other outcomes (such as biodiversity, social amenity, and water quality) that make it hard to articulate the problem as a whole. Wicked problems display the following features: There is no definitive formulation: formulation is part of the problem.There is no clear point at which a wicked problem is solved, and there are no right or wrong solutions. Wicked problems can be managed in more or less effective ways with a combination of methods creating more or less beneficial results over time.An observer’s perception of how a problem may be tackled creates a bias in how they are likely to articulate a problem.
What’s wrong with global challenges?
Published in Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2022
David Ludwig, Vincent Blok, Marie Garnier, Phil Macnaghten, Auke Pols
Furthermore, not only the formulation but also the responses to wicked problems are contested. Wicked problems do not have one straightforward solution, and responses tend to be contested as they affect stakeholders in dramatically different ways. To emphasise this point, wicked problems are commonly contrasted with ‘tame problems’, which have straightforward and technical solutions that can be provided by appropriate experts (Lach, Rayner, and Ingram 2005; DeFries and Nagendra 2017). Again, the contestation of global food production provides a salient example as agricultural sciences involve many tame problems with technical solutions (e.g. how to genetically engineer pesticide resistant seeds) as well as wicked problems (e.g. the desirable role of genetically engineered seeds in agricultural systems). In this sense, the wicked dimensions of GGCs like food production give rise to different future visions from agroecology to agricultural intensification, each with dramatically different implications for stakeholders in heterogeneous positions in global agrifood systems.
Why are we not renovating more? An elaboration of the wicked problem of renovating apartment buildings
Published in Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems, 2021
Rikard Sundling, Henrik Szentes
Horn and Weber (2007) argued that the best approach to wicked problems is to accept their insolvability by adapting to their cyclical nature. Instead of solving wicked problems, they instead argued for re-solving them. The ever-changing nature of wicked problems means there is a need to re-learn, re-evaluate and re-solve as time goes on. However, this does not apply fully to renovation, since there is no iterative process regarding the renovation of a building. Renovated apartment buildings are expected to last for several decades. This is especially true for those that aim to reduce energy use significantly (Ott et al. 2014), because of the high investment cost. While an iterative approach could be adopted in facilities management, it is simply too costly and impractical to re-do the renovation every now and again. Nevertheless, this approach is well suited for the planning phase of the renovation. Moreover, when viewing the building from a lifecycle perspective, further renovations are expected later, even though they might take place decades into the future.