Abstract
Contemporary design thinking is often described as a designerly approach to dealing with wicked problems – problems that are too complex and deemed impossible to fix, but that can be tamed and solved with proper design methods. Wickedness is a fundamental justification for designing things as a leap of faith or even as a kind of magic. This practice-based design research questions this justification while also opening up new understandings of wickedness. By creating a Forum Theatre session with characters inspired by the musical Wicked as allegories for different design agents/subjects in an online event, the authors engaged design spectators in critical thinking of their own roles and practices from a broader social and political perspective. We conclude that wickedness is not necessarily a nasty quality of design problems and solutions but a relational quality that can be explored by anti-oppressive approaches to design thinking and design doing.
Keywords
design thinking, wicked problems, wickedness, theatre of the oppressed.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.668
Citation
Saito, C., Serpa, B.O., Angelon, R., and van Amstel, F. (2022) Coming to terms with design wickedness: Reflections from a forum theatre on design thinking, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.668
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Coming to terms with design wickedness: Reflections from a forum theatre on design thinking
Contemporary design thinking is often described as a designerly approach to dealing with wicked problems – problems that are too complex and deemed impossible to fix, but that can be tamed and solved with proper design methods. Wickedness is a fundamental justification for designing things as a leap of faith or even as a kind of magic. This practice-based design research questions this justification while also opening up new understandings of wickedness. By creating a Forum Theatre session with characters inspired by the musical Wicked as allegories for different design agents/subjects in an online event, the authors engaged design spectators in critical thinking of their own roles and practices from a broader social and political perspective. We conclude that wickedness is not necessarily a nasty quality of design problems and solutions but a relational quality that can be explored by anti-oppressive approaches to design thinking and design doing.