Category: Abstract
Posted by: scott
Other Categories: Abstract , Event Notes , Pedagogy , Design and Management , of course , Presentation
This is an abstract for my talk at next week's symposium in Singapore - http://www.designthinking.sg/
The world is wicked indeed! - This is a play on the phrase attributed to Horst Rittel to describe the kind of problems that are of such great complexity that they require an interdependent set of participants to address and that these solutions may often lead to new problems.
We do, after all, live in an era with incredibly complex problems. Amongst those problems that have been identified there is an ever-shrinking number of solutions that we can claim. Moreover, fewer and fewer solutions seem to fulfill the needs and ideals of everyone - and yet we still have communities. Groups of these individuals may disagree on any number of topics but they find common ground with just one. This affinity crystallizes their relationship, allowing them to make productive decisions and to realize the real potential of difference. If we can teach people to appreciate this point, then they will become practitioners that see the community within their project as well as the communities that exist outside of it. That is to say – we can tame the wicked.
As an assistant professor in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design I teach students to begin by addressing the design question rather than its solution. Through their work in project-based courses and in discourse-based pedagogy students learn to identify communities as heterogeneous groups rather than as stagnant and isolated blocs. In this talk I will present some of the work from these courses as a way of describing how this approach can be effectively used as a method to aid a wide variety of communities from large multinational corporations to small isolated urban centers.
The world is wicked indeed! - This is a play on the phrase attributed to Horst Rittel to describe the kind of problems that are of such great complexity that they require an interdependent set of participants to address and that these solutions may often lead to new problems.
We do, after all, live in an era with incredibly complex problems. Amongst those problems that have been identified there is an ever-shrinking number of solutions that we can claim. Moreover, fewer and fewer solutions seem to fulfill the needs and ideals of everyone - and yet we still have communities. Groups of these individuals may disagree on any number of topics but they find common ground with just one. This affinity crystallizes their relationship, allowing them to make productive decisions and to realize the real potential of difference. If we can teach people to appreciate this point, then they will become practitioners that see the community within their project as well as the communities that exist outside of it. That is to say – we can tame the wicked.
As an assistant professor in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design I teach students to begin by addressing the design question rather than its solution. Through their work in project-based courses and in discourse-based pedagogy students learn to identify communities as heterogeneous groups rather than as stagnant and isolated blocs. In this talk I will present some of the work from these courses as a way of describing how this approach can be effectively used as a method to aid a wide variety of communities from large multinational corporations to small isolated urban centers.
I have been invited to present a paper at the American Anthropological Society's Annual Meeting in December, 2009. My colleague Tim Malefyt who is the director of cultural discoveries at BBDO Worldwide and a part-time faculty member at Design and Management authored the panel with Brian Moeran of the Copenhagen Business School. I am really excited to speak about my own work in this context. Read the abstract after the jump...
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