“The paper Rittel read aloud to West’s seminar in 1967 was not primarily about design methods but design problems: problems that Rittel believed should be the purview of design, [...]. What united these problems, Rittel said, was first that the actual problem was always indeterminate. It was hard to tell, in other words, if you had diagnosed the problem correctly, because if you dug deeper — why does this problem occur? — you could always find a more fundamental cause than the one you were addressing. These problems also didn’t have true or false answers, only better or worse solutions. [...] There was no definitive test of a solution, no proof. [...] They had intrinsically high stakes [...]. The designer had no “right to be wrong,” because these problems mattered. Human lives, or the quality of human lives, were on the line. Rittel called them “wicked problems.”
For Rittel, design problems’ wickedness meant that they could never be subject to a single process of resolution. There could be no one “method.” [..] Understanding the problem required understanding its context. It wasn’t possible to gather full information before starting to formulate solutions. Nothing was linear or consistent; designers didn’t, couldn’t, think that way. If there was any describing the design process, it was as an argument. Design was a multiplicity of critical voices batting a problem around unknown terrain until it formed itself, or not, into some kind of resolution.
[...] Beneath most problems (“competitiveness”), Horst Rittel would remind us, lie wickeder problems. “Design thinking” can’t solve the wicked problems [such as] poverty, income disparity, structural racism, environmental injustice, unregulated market capitalism. You face wicked problems by struggling with them, not by solutioning them. You argue, you iterate, you fail, you grieve, you fight.”