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Showing posts from December, 2020

Tackling Wicked Problems with my Students During a Pandemic

Some of you may know that one of the central components in my Code+Design class at York is the design thinking process. For those unfamiliar with that, it is a system developed out of Stanford University and other design studios to solve problems. This is Wikipedia’s definition : Design thinking encompasses processes such as context analysis, problem finding and framing, ideation and solution generating, creative thinking, sketching and drawing, modeling and prototyping, testing and evaluating. Core features of design thinking include the abilities to: resolve ill-defined or 'wicked' problems adopt solution-focused strategies use abductive and productive reasoning employ non-verbal, graphic/spatial modeling media, for example, sketching and prototyping. Wicked problems Design thinking is especially useful when addressing problems which are wickedly difficult, in the sense of being ill-defined or tricky, not malicious. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber contrasted these with "t