Innovative Thinking for Complex Problems: Crafting Sustainable Solutions through Design
Sustainability, one of the most fashionable topics these days, one on which a considerable 'hype' has formed and spread, as it is often said. What's more, strictly shaken and not stirred.
But it would be naive, to say the least, to think that sustainability is something 'that is now being talked about', because in reality it has been talked about in a circumstantial and structured manner for almost ten years now, since the first draft of the Agenda for Sustainable Development, consisting of a set of goals that should be realised by 2030, was drawn up in its first incarnation back in 2015.
And this is precisely the point: in order to achieve an objective that can solve a problem, it is necessary to be able to formulate the problem itself, to be able to describe it with requirements and to be able to find a solution, and while it is well known that problem-requirement-solution are three concepts that are intimately linked, it is also true that this link is by no means linear, nor even deterministic, and has so many facets that it is not only difficult to solve, but also difficult to define.
Just a quick glance at even two or three of the sustainability goals described in the work carried out by the United Nations is enough to realise that to even remotely think of achieving them in a stable and definitive manner is of a complexity that can leave one dumbfounded, if only because it is something extremely critical and important for our present and especially future existence.
We are facing more than just 'problems', these are real challenges, and the stakes are very high.
How can these challenges be effectively addressed? Let us first try to understand what it is all about, that is, let us try to define the problem.
As early as the mid-1960s, great figures such as Professor Horst Rittel began to deal extensively with approaches to problem solving, and together with other researchers began to describe in detail a category of particularly complex and challenging situations called Wicked Problem, problems characterised by a number of basic elements such as:
- The solution depends on how the problem is formulated
- The stakeholders involved are extremely varied and have diametrically different and often completely conflicting opinions, views and degrees of knowledge
- The constraints on the problem as well as the resources needed to deal with it vary over time
- It is never possible to find a definitive solution to such problems
Particularly representative examples of the so-called Wicked Problems can be the Sustainability Goals listed in the work carried out by the United Nations.
This is why there is an absolute need for approaches to problem solving that on the one hand can be flexible enough to leave ample room for the creative generation of ideas to find innovative solutions, but on the other hand can be structured and organised in such a way as to allow for a systematic and disciplined approach that makes the best possible use of techniques and methods whose validity has been proven in the field by scientific research and experience.
In this direction, one of the most promising and attractive tools among those available today is DTMethod Design Thinking, developed by Inprogress Design Lab in collaboration with APMG International
DTMethod Design Thinking is based on the well-known Double Diamond Model developed by the UK Design Council as part of an initiative dedicated to the economic reconstruction of countries after World War II, and fully inherits its philosophy of 'divergent in exploring' and then 'convergent in defining' first the problem, and then a solution that is as innovative as it is effective.
The techniques and methods that are used in DTMethod have been carefully selected from a vast set of practices whose validity is amply proven by scientific research and accumulated experience in the field, and collectively constitute a vast set of genuine tools to be used collaboratively and continuously by design teams.
It is clear that such an articulated approach, which allows it to be structured and disciplined, but at the same time flexible and adaptable, lends itself particularly well to dealing with highly complex situations, for which it is extremely challenging to even give a sufficient formulation of the problem to be tackled and then attempt in various ways to identify practicable and promising paths, but always in a way that allows for a continuous evolutionary adaptation of the road taken, in order to correct its course.
DTMethod then as the ultimate tool to deal with the Wicked Problems of Sustainability?
Someone once said that when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and therefore particularly 'wicked' problems require equally 'wicked' approaches, which do not rely only on a technical-scientific method, because that alone is no longer enough
After all, 'a designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, economist and evolutionary strategist' in the words of the famous futurist visionary scientist Richard Buckminster Fuller.
