What, if anything, can design bring to the solving of complex problems?

Our planned conversation for this week's Chalet is based on a response to a Fast Company article. In the LinkedIn response thread there are two main characters of note: Don Norman and Charles L Mauro.

On the one hand Don Norman argues for a change to design education, as few designers "are equipped to work in these problem spaces." He follows by stating that "a combination of a deep understanding of people, technology, world history, and business are all required." Given that design "training" is moving away from proper degrees into a more atomized skills-based model (learn UX design in 4 weeks), there is no question that design education, already unequipped to provide a more complete liberal arts education, is moving further from being able to provide the deep pan-disciplinary understanding required to equip designers to solve complex problems.

On the other hand Charles Mauro suggests "DESIGN as a professional discipline will have almost no positive impact on actual complex problem resolution without a major rethink of where DESIGN expertise actually fits in the problem space." And that fit, as Mr Mauro sees it, is in effect that designers "are there to solve intuitive and comparatively simple problems using unstructured and mostly intuitive methods. In the process things actually (mostly) end up looking better visually." to which he adds: "Sorry, that is your role."

In the end we have two ominously similar views:

To summarize they agree: currently (most, if not all) designers are of no use in the solving of complex problems.

To begin to even address this I think it's helpful if we define "design" temporarily between two poles that we might trace back to the positions of the combatants above. We won't necessarily agree on the definitions below, or where on the axis we should be, but hopefully we can avoid going too deep into that and simply allow this to frame today's discussion.

A narrow definition

If on the one hand we define design narrowly, in the context of disciplines such as graphic design, user experience design, service design or interface design, then we define design at the level of execution (as opposed to strategy). While this compartmentalizes designers in a potentially unrealistic way what it allows (even given the current state of design education) is that we can expect some level of expertise if someone is trained in a given design discipline.

There is a clarity in that role, for example someone might say "I am a graphic designer", which provides a fairly clear idea of where their competency lies or the kinds of tasks they undertake and are compensated for day to day. It does however miss the fact that there is arguably a meta-knowledge to design, a way of thinking that spans the different disciplines and give designers common skills and mental models.

A wider definition

If on the other hand we take a wide approach where, to quote Herbert Simon, "to design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones." then anyone who devises such a course of action might be considered to be a designer. This wider definition is equally problematic as it allows for the possibility that "anyone" is a designer, which is a troubling position. I have a guitar, I can play a bit, but I am not a musician. Equally not everyone who "designs" by the definition above should be considered "a designer". There is a fuzzy line that brings us so very close to the death of expertise.

Design lives without a framework of formal qualifications, and suffers for it. At the same time proper qualifications mean little: there are bad designers with many qualifications, and good designers with fewer. Not to mention that we can debate whether there is objectively good and bad design and/or how one might classify it.

So either pole (the narrow definition and the wide one) is problematic in and of itself. The first seems to more closely fit Mr Mauro's position, the second more closely aligns to Mr Norman's.