Design as Dialectics

My friend John Cutler recently posted about teams falling in love with crafting the perfect problem statement in lieu of generating actionable solutions. In the past I’ve commented on teams offering solutions without understanding or exploring the larger problem space, thereby missing better solutions that better framing might reveal. Both are frequent errors, perhaps stemming from a similar way of conceptualizing design and product work.  

It is common in design to think of problem and solution as distinct “phases” of work. The famous “double diamond”, for example, explicitly depicts this, suggesting a linear progression from problem to solution space. In his 2017 article, “The Logic of the Design Problem”, Stephen J. Beckett suggested this thinking might be traced back to Herbert Simon, who argued that building out the problem space allows for a well-defined problem to then build a solution on.

Beckett argues, as I have, that design does not really work this way. Further, when it comes to complex or what are sometimes called “wicked” problems, design cannot work this way. Here design becomes more like community organizing than simple “problem solving”. As Donella Meadows famously put it, here you must engage and learn your way forward as you “dance” with the complex system. (In organizing this is what is meant by “struggling”.)

In such discussions many here rush to the double diamond’s defense. Maybe it just needs to be plural, some argue, repeating in an iterative fashion. This sounds good but is still misleading: The problem and solution space are not separate things. And this raises an interesting question: Why do we need an inaccurate model of design to help us better design? Couldn’t there be a more accurate and beneficial way of framing this? For instance, the notion of dancing or struggling with a system lends itself very nicely to the concept of dialectics.

I was excited when I started to think of design in this way, did some Googling, and very quickly realized that many others were already there. For one, this is how I first happened upon Beckett’s excellent article. To use dialectics as a lens for design, however, we must first avoid a common error. After all, the most popular way to describe dialectics is itself misleading. The popular notion is that there is a thesis, its antithesis, and then a synthesis of the two, doing away with the thesis-antithesis contradiction and leading to something new.

Notice that this popular misconception repeats the same error of the double diamond. Just as problem and solution space are not separate things, thesis and antithesis are more accurately thought of as facets of the same identical thing. Dialectics, Beckett contends, is contradiction through negation, where “negation” is the contrast through which a thing is defined. Beckett suggests this is rather like a figure-ground illusion, the same concept I have been using to think of problem and solution space.

The popular notion of the synthesis “undoing” the contraction is also false. Instead, both thesis and antithesis are reconfigured (or reframed or rethought) in light of the contradiction, becoming a new thesis (which will have its own antithesis). This is a crucial point: The thesis, here the “problem”, is what the designer is actually designing. The problem is an abstraction, a model, a reduction of the actual situation. This is not done to create the “perfect” problem statement, but to iteratively reveal better ways forward.

Every “problem” dialectically contains its “solution” as its own negation (antithesis). Our designer dances with the system and learns their way forward, developing the contradiction between the situation as is and as it ought to be, attributing qualities to the problem so as to highlight possible negations (as solutions). As Beckett emphasizes, nothing is viewed as “problematic” without some notion of what would be preferable—this contrast is “negation”.

The real goal here, however, is the “negation of the negation”. This is when the thesis-antithesis, or the problem-solution opposition, is itself sublated, producing a shift in perspective that leads to a new understanding of the situation itself. This reconfiguration of the situation, this reframe, is the real meat and potatoes of design. If all this “negation” and “sublation” sounds a little esoteric, I have also seen this put in terms of the Yin-Yang, which offers a nice way to think about problem and solution space.

The importance of “sublation” perhaps points to another limitation of the double diamond: “Problem solving” is not the real crux of design in the first place. A reaction (or “solution”) from within the same frame is not “designing”. As Kees Dorst argues, design proper is more about reconfiguring the context itself, reframing what was already there in a way that clears the “stuckness” of the situation. Acting on the insight produced may then entail “building things”, but what is built is less the aim of design as much as this shift in perspective that then clears the way to something new.

When the designer moves to try something new, the focus is often on the experiential aim of the designed output. The design of the output—whatever it is—is iteratively tweaked in light of what is believed to provide the intended experience. Once output is “out” in the world, the actual experiential impacts created in the user’s context, which include the user’s own goals and aims, will help determine whether target outcomes are achieved, whether users then change their behavior in desired ways.

This interplay of intervention and reaction, of output with experiential aim on one side and of experiential impact and actual outcomes on the other, is itself a complex system spinning out larger systemic effects. As is the case with complex systems, some of these larger effects will be unintended. Monitoring this is part of the theory and praxis interchange, part of the signal helping to inform the direction of future output design. This leads to better questions, larger concepts, and more impactful systemic interventions. 

Until next time.