2.2.    Rittel: Deliberating from Perspectives

When Rittel declared in his Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning that “planning problems are inherently wicked” (Rittel & Webber, 1973, p.160), he thereby spelled out that characteristic of planning and design tasks that has subsequently become the central source of perplexity in trying to imagine a computer system that can effectively support the challenging aspects of design. Computer programs have traditionally been devised in accordance with the classical example of tame science and engineering problems—precisely the paradigm that Rittel argued is not applicable to the problems of open societal systems with which planners and designers are generally concerned. This inadequate approach assumes that a problem can first of all be formulated as an exhaustive set of specifications. Then, based on such a problem statement, possible solutions can be evaluated to see which are optimal solutions to the problem. Computer programs based on this paradigm must represent in advance the space of problems and solutions for a well-defined type of design problem in an explicit, comprehensive, and non-controversial (objective) manner. However, as Rittel points out, in order to program such a computer system,

you would have to anticipate all potential deontic judgments ahead of time before the machine could run. But if you did that you wouldn't need the computer because you would have had to have thought up all the solutions ahead of time. Therefore it is almost ridiculous to claim that there will be a designing machine if design is thought of in this sense. (Rittel, 1972, p.323)

Rittel claimed that the wicked problems of planning could not begin to be understood in the first place until one had already started to explore directions for solutions. He described what Heidegger calls the hermeneutic circle of understanding (see Section 4.3) when he argued, “that you cannot understand the problem without having a concept of the solution in mind; and that you cannot gather information meaningfully unless you have understood the problem, but that you cannot understand the problem without information about it” (Rittel, 1972, p.321).

Suppose, for instance, that you are asked to plan a mission to the moon for four astronauts for a period of 45 days. According to NASA, the purpose has been specified as: to explore long-term stays for crews of international backgrounds and mixed gender and to conduct some scientific research and some site work to prepare for future moon bases. In thinking about the design of the lunar habitat for this mission, you might begin to discuss the importance of privacy issues with other people on your design team. You might feel that not only was some physical privacy needed for cultural reasons, but psychologically there would be a need to structure a careful mix of public and private spaces and opportunities. These privacy issues might become paramount to your design even though they had not been included in the original problem statement. In this way, the set of issues to be investigated and concerns to be balanced would emerge and evolve as the planning process took place. Your ability to interpret the problem as one of privacy would have been based on your tacit preunderstanding of privacy as part of human life. On this basis you could then explicitly explore lunar privacy through discussion, simulation, or research on analogous situations.

In opposition to the then dominant methods of operations research that tried to compute optimal solutions from static and well-defined (“tame”) problem statements, Rittel called for a model of planning as “an argumentative process in the course of which an image of the problem and of the solution emerges gradually among the participants, as a product of incessant judgment, subjected to critical argument” (1973, p.162). The language used in actual, significant planning processes is itself the result of discussion and debate among various parties, each of whom uses subjective judgments to criticize hidden assumptions and to reconstrue implicit meanings of terms. No one view of the problem or its solution has a necessary priority. The framing of problems and the judging of solutions arise through critique, deliberation, and reinterpretation, not by inference from an objective viewpoint. For Rittel, people's perspectives on problems are necessarily based on subjective conditions such as their individual value systems and political commitments or their personal roles vis a vis the proposed solutions:

For wicked planning problems, there are no true or false answers. Normally, many parties are equally equipped, interested, and/or entitled to judge the solutions, although none has the power to set formal decision rules to determine correctness. Their judgments are likely to differ widely to accord with their group or personal interests, their special value-sets, and their ideological predilections. (p.163)

 Consider again the concept of privacy in the lunar habitat. A design team might start from the idea of visual privacy. Through discussion of the implications of life in this confined space, they might want to include protection from the noise of flushing toilets and snoring neighbors. But then the design team member concerned with medical contingencies might introduce a notion of privacy for an injured astronaut who needs to recuperate. Psychologists, sociologists, engineers, and other members of the design team would each come to the common task with different perspectives. Given a methodology that builds on the strengths of design as an argumentative group process, these differences can contribute to a robust solution that takes into account a variety of competing and interacting insights, not all of which could have been anticipated in advance. Also central to Rittel's notion of argumentation or deliberation is the idea of critique as a driving force for improving one's thinking and designs. Thus an information system should not only confirm and add to one's knowledge, but also question and weaken elements of that knowledge and even delete some of it (Kunz & Rittel, 1984).

Wicked problems are open-ended in that there is no fixed set of objective criteria or procedures that can be applied to them. There is what Rittel termed the “essential uniqueness” of these problems:

By “essentially unique” we mean that, despite long lists of similarities between a current problem and a previous one, there might be an additional distinguishing property that is of overriding importance. . . . There are no classes of wicked problems in the sense that principles of solution can be developed to fit all members of a class. . . . Despite seeming similarities among wicked problems, one can never be certain that the particulars of a problem do not override its commonalities with other problems already dealt with. (Rittel, 1973, p.164)

This creates a serious difficulty for supposed systems of domain knowledge. Rules, critiquing procedures, and design rationale cannot be applied to problems automatically based on their similarities to past problems or to prototypical problems of the domain. A given new problem may have some characteristic that makes the chosen rule irrelevant or inappropriate. The rule may need to be modified to fit the uniqueness of the problem. The problem with rules is that they always need meta-rules for applying them to cases. Algorithmically, this leads to an infinite regress which can only be circumvented by an act of human judgment of appropriateness (see Wittgenstein, 1953). Automated systems always rely in the end on a judgment by their designer that a certain measure of similarity will suffice; for the wicked problems of innovative design this is inadequate. Judgments of, for instance, the nature and priority of privacy under different conditions is a matter of interpretation. The situated, perspectival, and linguistic nature of interpretation means that each act of interpretation is essentially unique and its uniqueness must be taken into account. (See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the problem of application of rules and its implications for the computer support of interpretation in design.)

Somehow, the dimensions of the design problem must be allowed to emerge and change as different perspectives are brought to bear, as initial approaches are subjected to questioning, and as solutions gradually emerge. Rittel proposed systematic issue-based information systems (Ibis) to keep track of the issues that were being deliberated from various positions (Kunz & Rittel, 1970). Paper systems for organizing all the issues in complex planning activities soon proved unwieldy, so Rittel proposed computer support for them: “If, for example, you clearly organize a planning process according to such an argumentative model as an Ibis (issue-based information system), you will find that the bureaucratic effort of administering the process is abominable, and therefore one might look for administrative and monitoring computer aids to ease the process” (Rittel, 1972, p.324).

Rittel himself made some initial attempts to define issue-based information systems, leading to more recent computerized systems like Mikroplis (McCall, 1985), gIbis (Conklin, et al., 1988), and other programs that will be reviewed later in Chapter 7. (Figure 2-1 shows a view of an Ibis display in Hermes.)

Computer systems may be useful for storing, organizing, and communicating complex networks of argumentation—as long as they do not stifle innovation by imposing fixed representations of the ideas they capture or limiting diversity of interpretive viewpoints. Computer support for planning and design processes as Rittel conceived of them must allow team members to articulate their individual views and judgments, to communicate these to each other, and to forge shared perspectives. It must support deliberation or argumentation.

Rittel concluded that the proper role for computers and information systems generally is that of an enhancer of natural (human) intelligence, not an artificial substitute for it. In Designing Crutches for Communication (Kunz & Rittel, 1984), he uses the image of prosthetic devices like crutches or eye glasses: “The glasses do not see instead of you, or on your behalf. Neither does the automobile relieve you from traveling. They are prosthetic devises which support, reinforce, enhance some capacity or activity” (p.54). Because the role of information science is not to automate problem-solving but to augment human problem-solving, it must be based on an analysis of how people use information and solve their problems: “Here lies the central task of information science: to develop methods for exploring its users' knowledge and their modes of reasoning, i.e., the systems analysis of problem solving and information” (p.60). Given Rittel’s view of design as argumentation from perspectives, this means computers should support people’s perspectival interpretation processes.

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