Design Thinking: Wicked Problems, IDEO's Butter-Dish Mouse and the Backlash

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In the 1970s urban planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber separated tame problems, which may be hard but have fixed rules and a clear end, from wicked problems, which involve conflicting values and change with every intervention. The episode contrasts engineering a bridge, a tame problem, with deciding where to put it. Design thinking grew as a second-generation method after the formal rationalism of the space race. In the late 1970s Bryan Lawson gave a colored-block puzzle to postgraduate science and architecture students: scientists worked out the rules first, while architects tried solutions and used them to discover the rules. This draws on abductive reasoning from Charles Sanders Peirce and the coevolution of problem and solution.

In the 1990s and 2000s Stanford's d.school and IDEO turned the approach into phases of inspiration, ideation and implementation, built on empathic design championed by David and Tom Kelley, divergent then convergent thinking, and crude prototypes that invite honest criticism. By the 2010s it was sold as a fix for business, K-12 education and social change. In the 2020s a backlash grew against its commercialized workshop form. Critics say it gives creative confidence without capability, elevates outside designers over communities' lived expertise, and treats entrenched problems such as poverty and food deserts with community gardens or apps when decades of redlining and inequality are at stake.

• For Apple's first commercial mouse, IDEO taped roll-on deodorant balls to plastic butter dishes and refined the design by watching people use them.
• Rough cardboard prototypes are used because people hesitate to criticize polished work.
• Rittel and Webber held that wicked problems have no true or false answers, only better or worse ones.
• Critics compare short corporate empathy interviews with research that takes months or years of embedded study.
• The episode concludes that design thinking works best as a partnership with communities, not a replacement for expertise.