"Wicked Problems in Design Thinking" (Richard Buchanan, 1992)

An essay by Richard Buchanan published in Design Issues vol. 8 no. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 5-21, from a lecture first given in 1990. It presents design thinking as a new liberal art that works across four areas of contemporary life (symbols, things, actions and environments, later called the four orders of design), introduces the idea of placements as the designer's tool for finding new possibilities, and imports Rittel and Webber's wicked problems into design to explain why design problems are indeterminate. Richard Buchanan's influential 1992 paper brought Rittel and Webber's tame/wicked distinction powerfully into the heart of design discourse, arguing that design was no longer concerned merely with the tame problems of shaping material objects but was increasingly confronting the indeterminate and complex wicked problems found in systems and interactions.