Wicked Problems - Problems Worth Solving (wickedproblems.com)
Austin Center for Design today published a new book focused on the role of design in social entrepreneurship. Titled Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, the book is presented as a handbook for teaching, learning, and doing meaningful disruptive design work. The book includes an introduction to wicked problems, describing some of the challenges and opportunities of design-led entrepreneurial activities. The text describes the skills necessary for successful entrepreneurship, and offers both methods and curricula for learning how to engage with large scale humanitarian problems.
The book is available for free in its entirety online, at http://www.wickedproblems.com, and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which allows anyone to use the contents for their own non-commercial purposes.
12 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 33.1 ms ] threadI often think that many charities and other altruistic organisations are stuck in various anti-patterns, some left over from as long ago as the Victorian era.
We've learnt a lot about getting big things done in the modern world; there's no reason that that expertise should only be applied to profit-seeking.
Does anyone have any good links to analysis and solutions strategies for wicked problems in general?
Arguably, all wicked problems ARE social and systemic problems, at least as defined by most respected literature on the topic. The terms have been a bit overused in popular business culture, applied to problems that, while complex, aren't part of interconnected and systemic humanitarian problems.
https://wickedproblems.com/1_wicked_problems.php has more on this; Rittel is perhaps the most significant source for this topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
It's a really powerful concept that describes many extremely complex systems like, say, health care in the U.S.
Maybe I'm too old school, but I find the context switch jarring when I am reading and click for the next segment, and am met with more A/V. I have different mechanisms for ingesting content, almost in a "introspective" versus "extraspective" distinction (study time versus lectures highlight this distinction).
I turned autoplay off; that may make it less jarring. I also have an old-school approach to reading, but "the kids these days" seem to like the videos..
Thanks for the input. Jon
I hope it proves to be a catalyst for the next great idea.
Examples include weight loss, get rich quick ebooks, and viagra. All deal with wicked problems.