"Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" (Horst Rittel & Melvin Webber, 1973)

A paper by Horst Rittel, professor of the science of design, and Melvin Webber, professor of city planning, both at the University of California, Berkeley, published in Policy Sciences vol. 4 no. 2 (June 1973), pp. 155-169, from a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969. It is the origin of the term wicked problem: the authors list ten properties that make problems of social policy impossible to define, test or solve in the way science solves tame problems. Rittel and Webber's seminal 1973 article, which first defined both tame and wicked problems, argued that many of society's most pressing issues are not well-suited to the traditional, linear problem-solving approaches of science and engineering, requiring instead a more nuanced understanding of complexity and context.