Related Terms: Wicked Problems – Wicked Challenges; World-Building
“We are confronted in the twenty-first century with an array of serious problems but among them two immense challenges stand out: on the one hand, those problems presented by carbon technologies, and, on the other hand, those posed by silicon technologies.” (Daniel Ross, 2019)
In the philosophy of design emerging (incompletely) in these web pages, design practices are not defined primarily in terms of their ‘problem-solving’ capabilities. Rather, they are considered as provisional responses to challenges of different kinds and orders, many of which are deemed ‘wicked’ in character. These responses, then, while far from necessarily providing ‘solutions’, nevertheless address the challenges in substantive ways.
In doing so, they may alleviate some of the stresses within the challenge but they may also change the character of the challenge which remains, albeit in altered form, and which calls for further design responses. Some of these further responses may address the remaining stresses of the initial challenge. Others may address the novel challenges raised by the design response in a world that remains pervaded by challenges and is increasingly defined by the remnants of prior design responses to those challenges which evolve over time. The legacies of some of these designed responses, given the changing terrain, may turn into explicit obstacles rather than having the character of remaining a ‘solution’ to a past challenge.
The question of what design practices and designs ‘do’ is framed by this schema, as a theorised ‘context’ for designing, a context which incorporates relevant design responses to ongoing challenges and the remnants of past design responses that now operate as obstacles to, or misdirections for, emergent designing.
Since theorising and philosophising tend to operate using generalities (part of their limitations as design practices), which are no longer easily discussed as ‘universals’ due to the perceived limitations of European thinking particularly in its historical development in defining a ‘modern’ anthropo-Eurocentric world, discussion of the challenges to which designing may respond have tended to take the form of the outlining the tensions between ‘man’ (the human) and ‘world’ (the natural).
This ‘general’, ‘universal’ or ‘global’ perspective was seldom in the past adopted in (professional) design practices as the horizon in which designers perceived themselves to operate. However, design practices themselves have expanded to incorporate wider horizons through the development of such fields as participatory design, ecological design and design as policy-making. Nevertheless, a ‘gap’ or an ‘aporia’ remains between ‘design thinking’ and ‘thinking about global challenges’.
To illustrate this ‘aporia’, let us take, for example, a number of global challenges identified by Bernard Stiegler, as outlined by Daniel Ross (2018: 11) in the Introduction to the English translation of Neganthropocene. They are:
- the rise of online social networks;
- the growth of the ubiquitous interactive screen;
- the global financial crisis as symptomatic of the tendency of investment to become increasingly short-term and speculative;
- the proliferation of geopolitical crises, terrorism and related forms of individual and collective ‘acting out’;
- automation as a threat to a consumerist macro-economic system founded on employment-based purchasing power;
- the Anthropocene as an ‘existential threat’ to human existence and the biosphere; and
- the unravelling of the consequences of industrially-generated populism, including the entrance into a so-called ‘post-truth’ age where alternative facts proliferate.
Ross and Stiegler in this listing are taking up an explicitly, even if ‘critical’, ‘Western’ or anthropo-Eurocentric positioning in relation to ‘the human’ and ‘the world’. Kevin Rudd similarly specifies a number of global policy domains or global change-drivers which pose significant challenges for the world. However, Rudd’s perspective seeks to understand China’s evolving role in these domains. Rudd cites:
- China as a powerful global economic actor (geo-economic challenges)
- the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union (geo-political challenges)
- the ongoing digital revolution (emerging, disruptive technological challenges)
- climate change (environmental challenges exacerbated by anthropocentric action)
- demographic change (the challenges of human groupings and of being-human)
These positionalities, as any other, seek to determine an abstract ‘universality’ of the condition of ‘the world’, but the question remains of the ‘for whom’ these issues are ‘challenges’ to be met.
Each of these challenges or policy domains might be defined as wicked’ or, indeed, as aspects of one great entangled ‘wicked challenge’, that of how to sustain human existence in the world or how to sustain the world grasped through the lens of ‘being-human’: the ‘world-as-human’. Are ‘world’ and ‘human’ permanently and inevitably at odds or are they part of an ongoing ‘evolutionary dialogue’ in which neither is, or can be, ‘aware’?
Professional design practices may be drawn upon to address aspects of these challenges through their employment by government, in explicit or implicit policy-making and policy implementation, or by business and industry, both in their traditional roles in design for production and in design for consumption. The academic disciplines around teaching and research on designing remains largely associated with professional development for operation within these two major contexts.
The question remains as to whether there is any other role designing (un-professionally, un-disciplinedly) can play in bringing to attention the limits of designing’s own deployment in addressing the ‘global’ challenges in which design practices play, contradictorily, both a minor and a major part. Does designing have a significant part to play, in its participatory forms, in what used to be called ‘civil society’ and in those institutions that are defined as non-governmental and charitable. The problem of the ‘humanitarian’ remains tied up in the complex consequences of the Post-World War Two settlement and the bases of a rights-based system which claims an abstract universality but practices concrete differentiations.
Even if there is such a space for designing, in this context, practices of designing will remain ‘compromised’, their goals necessarily always incomplete, as they must engage with their own pasts and the ongoing challenges with which they must become engaged and through which they must re-define or un-design themselves and the residual world in which we (individuals, citizens, consumers, workers?), or rather we-they, reside.
Reference
Joyce, J. (2000) Ulysses [with an introduction by Declan Kiberd]. London, UK: Penguin Books.
Ross, D. (2018) Introduction. In Stiegler, B. (2018) The Neganthropocene. London, UK: Open Humanities Press, pp.7-32.
Ross, D. (2019) Carbon and silicon: contribution to a critique of political economy. Available at https://internation.world/arguments-on-transition/chapter-10/
Rudd, K. (2024) On Xi Jinping: How X’s Marxist nationalism is shaping China and the world. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
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