Dealing with Wicked Problems: Normative Paradigms for Design Thinking

Wicked problems, such as climate change, poverty, and antibiotic resistance, are ethical problems, as moral plurality about the social good is one of their constituting factors. Although wicked problems cannot be fully solved, they are urgent and demand intervention. While design thinking was suggested in the 1990s to deal with wicked problems, it is still an open question how it can address moral plurality. In this article, we consider how design thinking can address moral plurality in wicked problems. We propose that designers using design thinking can adopt four normative paradigms toward moral plurality, namely moral agnosticism (design for solutions), moral pragmatism (design for aggregated preferences), moral unificationism (design for community-created values), and transcendental moralism (design for The Good). Then, we argue that designers can address moral pluralism and deal with wicked problems within the first three approaches to normativity, provided that designers acknowledge that their responses to wicked problems may fail over time and require new design responses. Ignoring that possibility fits within the paradigm of transcendental moralism, which does not give designers the means to deal with wicked problems.