A wicked problem is a form of large-scale social or cultural problem that is difficult to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements. These dynamic, system problems are bucketed as “poverty” or “education”—large containers that fail to identify the nuanced nature of the actual issues themselves. For example, people in need of financial support may have difficulty paying their rent, feeding their family, holding a job, getting a job in the first place, and so on, a string of problems that lead to and are related to a state of destitution called poverty.

Clearly, not all problems are wicked; in fact, a problem can be incredibly difficult to solve but cannot be characterized as wicked until it has an indeterminacy of scope and scale. It can be argued that not all design problems are wicked, either—that the design of a chair, or a cup, or a website is fundamentally of a different nature from, say, the design of medical care or the design of an educational system.

The majority of societal problems are, by their very nature, wicked. Richard Buchanan was instrumental in advancing the discourse of wicked problems and design thinking, his primary contribution being an article he authored in 1992 called “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.” In this article, Buchanan describes that “design problems are ‘indeterminate’ and ‘wicked’ because design has no special subject matter of its own apart from what a designer conceives it to be. The subject matter of design is potentially universal in scope, because design thinking may be applied to any area of human experience.”⁷¹

Efforts to solve these social wicked problems are typically claimed by policymakers, who may rally a platform around a campaign of education reform or employment for all and use tools of governance to manipulate the issue. But frequently, new laws treat the symptoms and not the cause of the wicked problem; for example, policy may fund a shelter for the homeless, but those housed by the shelter will need a suite of programs to help them regain a legitimate place in society. These large-scale problems can be mitigated through the process of design, through an intellectual approach to design that emphasizes empathy, abductive reasoning, and rapid prototyping. The output of these design efforts describes the exact suite of services, interactions, products, and policies that can offer a dramatic change.

The Author Wears Productive Goggles when Solving Wicked Problems.

A related discipline of service design may offer substantial examples for conducting generative, probe-based research into wicked problems. In service design, the product is a service, something that almost always has an invisible component and is time-based. A traditional service might be one that leverages human capabilities. A lawn mowing service, for example, will trade someone's time (and presumably, their capabilities and skills) in exchange for money. A more timely example is Netflix; this company offers a delivery service of DVDs to the home through the mail system. Their product—the thing that people pay for—is the ability to interact with a website, to list movies that they want to see, and then to have those movies delivered to them at the frequency they desire. While there are artifacts involved in the service infrastructure (the DVDs are physical objects, and the website is a digital artifact that has been designed by a team of people to support particular tasks and goals), the service itself is nearly invisible. A service approach to Interaction Design starts by considering where value can be introduced into existing human flows and relationships and works outward from these human-to-human connections. Frequently, there is a need to describe digital, physical, organizational, and procedural changes to existing systems in order to complete a service design initiative.

Prototyping is critical in design, and it's no different in the design of service. What is different, however, is the medium in which the prototype is created. When prototyping a table, the designer uses various digital and physical forms to understand the various formal tradeoffs between size, shape, orientation, and so on. When prototyping a lawn mowing service, the designer must leverage different methods and materials. Storyboards, storytelling, role-play, bodystorming, and method acting are all used to explore how situations may evolve or play out and how people may respond to various human interactions.

These methods, and a larger philosophy that embraces a service design approach to problems, are critical in the design of products, services, and systems intended to support any form of humanitarian problem solving. Because wicked problems are by definition societal and cultural, they always involve people, and mitigation strategies to these problems always involve some form of service. Time-based prototypes and ways of simulating human interactions are fundamental in advancing design ideas and in working around Rittel's description that “solving a wicked problem frequently is a ‘one shot’ design effort, as a significant solution changes the design space enough to minimize the ability for trial and error.”

Because of the scale of these problems and the difficulty in testing solutions in a meaningful way prior to large-scale rollout, it may prove impossible to actually solve a wicked problem in the same way that one may solve a client problem (arrive at a state where the problem no longer exists—where the suboptimal state has been converted into a more optimal state). But this hardly signifies that these issues aren't worth addressing. Instead, the language that is used to describe and analyze the design approaches must shift, as must the perspective of those engaged in these problems. Granting agencies in the United States commonly demand a project approach that is finite and with a definitive start and end. This likely makes financial reporting easier for the agency and eases the minutiae of running the foundation (audits, for example, can be scheduled against a predetermined project plan). But this makes sense only when a predictable measure of success can be anticipated for a particular project. If a design strategy is to mitigate the emotional and cultural repercussions of poverty and limit the spread of homelessness to new generations and the tactics are experimental, one may be hard pressed to conform to a predetermined timeline. And efforts to force a project schedule around such a design engagement will likely impose arbitrary checkpoints and metrics that may serve only to add anxiety and stressors to the design team.

There are a number of ways of addressing wicked problems, and because of the scope and scale of these problems, it is likely a combination of approaches that will offer the most benefit. Designers are likely drawn to these problems because of the strong relationship between design and problem solving; many designers consider themselves problem solvers first and stylists second. There are several design-specific commonalities of wicked problems that distinguish these from more typical artifact-based design problems (design a chair or design a new website).

In wicked problems, the number of stakeholders is larger, and frequently, these stakeholders have competing (and often illogical) goals. For example, consider a seemingly positive activity like bringing computing power to African students, something at the heart of the One Laptop Per Child project. The solution of OLPC touches at least the following stakeholders: the governments of each country involved (in Africa, this includes Mali, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Mozambique, and South Africa); the World Economic Forum; Quanta Computers (the manufacturer of the hardware); the UN Development Program; fuse project (the designer of the hardware); Pentagram (the designer of the software); MIT Media Lab (the originating educational research institution); Fedora/Red Hat (the operating system); and many, many more. The likelihood of alignment between these agencies is low without a tremendous amount of facilitation, project management, and personal appeasement by a centralized coordinating agency.

The content is politically charged. The OLPC is an example of a placement shift, where the expected and obvious form of the solution is purposefully altered. One might assume that, in countries with massive poverty, the best forms of aid are water and food. Yet the OLPC project ignores both of these, characterizing them as short-term solutions to larger problems. Instead, education is necessary to drive self-sufficiency; it's the “teach a man to fish” adage embodied in silicon. This is, obviously, highly controversial. In fact, the OLPC site has an entire section on their website dedicated to refuting what they call a myth that “You're forcing this on poverty stricken areas that need food, water and housing rather than a laptop”; in their refutation, they state, “It is difficult to argue that education is not a necessary component to poverty reduction, probably being more effective than food donations or development aid; it is even more difficult to argue that children can be taught without books.”⁷² Negroponte addresses this directly in an interview with 60 Minutes:

There are more significant repercussions of both good and bad actions. Speaking directly to design judgment, this becomes a barometer to gauge impact. By designing coffee mugs and shoes and cars, we design behavior implicitly and in a diffused fashion. By designing for impact and addressing wicked problems, we design behavior explicitly and in a direct manner.

There's been a recent trend in popular media and design toward designing for impact or social innovation. Both phrases describe a repositioning of design activities in the context of the social good. The phrases imply planned, methodical approaches to problem solving that focus on behavioral change through empathy and prototyping. While design has always embraced humanity through a focus on end users (often described as “usable, useful, and desirable”), this is a purposeful shift away from design as an entity embedded in a business context and toward the realization of design as a methodology for social good and improvement that is distinct from processes of the corporation—that can stand on its own, without a corporate financial system backing it.

When design is embedded in the context of business, designers can reap the benefits of the corporation. Design activities can be well funded (although they frequently are not) and can leverage supply and distribution channels, and designers can utilize existing brand equity to encourage adoption of new products, systems, and services. Yet with all of these benefits, the confines of the corporation impose equal restrictions. Designers must frequently justify their activities in the context of ROI, attempting to quantify the subjective qualities of design to substantiate their continued financing. A publicly traded corporation introduces artificial time constraints on design activities, as quarterly profit announcements tend to introduce chaotic shifts in focus and reorganizations around seemingly arbitrary goals. And while designers may find personal satisfaction in the work they do on a day-to-day basis, the goal of the for-profit corporation is just that—profit—and so issues of humanitarian benefit and appropriateness are by definition given second-class priority, if any whatsoever.

Design, absent the context of business, has new opportunities and new challenges. Designers focusing on social innovation may find themselves without the necessary financial means to introduce their products, systems, and services. When designers target problems in foreign countries, they may not have the appropriate means of distribution to reach their target audiences. New challenges are introduced, such as navigating the political infrastructure of developing countries, and addressing these challenges in a meaningful way takes valuable resources. Yet the benefit for many who engage in designing for impact can be enormous. Design, absent the confines of business, is no longer tied to the short-term thrust of quarterly profit reporting, where growth needs to be exhibited continually and in small increments (every 3 months). Issues of financial profitability are replaced with concerns of financial sustenance: Can the organization generate enough money to continue to realize the intended solution?

And of most importance, a designer focusing on humanitarian impact can address issues that are of most pressing concern to humanity without being forced to address questions of financial viability, brand differentiation, constant innovation, and the competitive drive of the marketplace. In a sense, designers engaged in these types of activities are given the benefit of judgment, as they can decide what problems to focus on. While a designer at a major communications company may bemoan the task of designing a ring-tone purchasing flow or an advertising campaign for unlimited minutes, designers engaged in social and humanitarian change can ultimately select to focus only on the problems that they find most pressing, demanding, and important.

Perhaps more interesting than the dichotomy between for profit and for impact is when these two extremes blend together. There have been several illustrations of design in the context of business, focusing exclusively on humanitarian impact yet with all intent of driving large-scale revenue generation.

Socially Responsible Peanut Butter is Ideal for Ants on a Log

Nutty Solutions is a peanut butter company that intends to fight against malnutrition in children at key stages in their development. The company intends to produce gourmet peanut butter (usually sold for a high premium in the United States) and then use this revenue stream to finance the production of RUFT, or ready-to-use therapeutic foods, intended for consumption in Nepal, where a “a child dies of malnutrition every 14 minutes. We aim to establish a local RUTF production facility here, in collaboration with non-profit organizations working in the area.”⁷⁴

MPower Labs is an incubator and business accelerator that exists to “empower the underserved by accelerating the growth of businesses that bring new and needed products and services to this market.”⁷⁵ This involves the funding and coaching of startups that drive financial service products intended for those in need, such as Rêv Worldwide and Mango Financial, Inc.

Both of these examples have framed design in a larger context of social good while embracing standard business issues of revenue generation, growth, and frequently, outright profitability. The result can be extremely powerful, as the distribution mechanisms of the for-profit business can be leveraged to reach a massive audience and distribute a powerful message.

The pyramid referenced in the phrase the bottom of the pyramid is a wealth pyramid that describes the small quantity of haves at the top with an exponentially larger quantity of have nots at the bottom characterized primarily by their lack of income (often less than a few dollars per day). The pyramid makes visual what has long been the distribution of wealth in the world—that a small number of people maintain control over a large amount of resources. But the late C. K. Prahalad uses the pyramid to illustrate a much less politically charged, although highly controversial, message: that through volume, there is a fortune to be made at the bottom of the pyramid if only we understand the cultural implications of designing for, and selling products to, those who find themselves at that part of the system. This is the seeming utopia where the five billion citizens in the developing world will find themselves with purchasing power and access to manufactured goods for sale, for the first time, ever. Prahalad urges large companies to target those developing this purchasing power and in some cases even seems to imply that the risk of not targeting the developing world could be financially catastrophic. As he describes, “The World Resources Institute and the International Finance Corp. just concluded a massive study, and they came up with 4 billion people living on $2 or less a day. In a family of five, that's $3,650 per year… In India, wireless-communication companies are adding 5 million new subscribers per month. They expect, by 2010, to have 400 million subscribers connected wirelessly. If you're Nokia, or Motorola, or Ericsson, and you don't participate in that market, 50% of your future business is gone.”⁷⁶

But not all agree with Prahalad's view of private enterprise acting to sell to the poor. Some claim that he's overestimated the size of the market, while others take issue with his view of the poor as consumers, emphasizing that they have labor and productive capacity and that the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid will come from empowering the poor to produce and then by purchasing goods and services created by them.

Irrespective of the specific means by which those at the bottom of the pyramid are introduced into the larger consumer/producer financial ecosystem, the introduction appears both inevitable as well as filled with promise and potential. Technological ubiquity and affordability are the means by which these developing countries are becoming empowered, and design will be the way in which this technology is humanized and introduced. It is designers who will bear the ethical responsibility and ask the difficult questions of appropriateness, and so it is designers who must learn methods of cultural empathy and explore the significance of new product and service introduction.

Technological ubiquity has introduced a new look at—and frequently, rejection of—institutionalized social services. These services are usually large, anonymous, process-based systems that serve a mass quantity of people poorly rather than a small quantity of people well. These types of services exist in health care, education, and government. And the rejection of these services appears to be a coalescence of personal care, personal education, and technological enablement.

Designer Hugh Dubberly notes a similar trend: “Reframing health as self-management parallels similar trends in education, where we increasingly recognize students manage (or design) their own learning, and design practice, where we increasingly recognize users manage (or design) their own experiences. Perhaps these changes are part of larger trends, the democratizing of professionalism and the shift from a mechanical-object ethos to an organic-systems ethos.” This trend helps to explain the recent fascination with design in the context of big business (or perhaps the fascination helps to explain the trend); the designerly way of considering problems is organic, not linear, and certainly not driven toward algorithmic repeatability. ⁷⁷

In some ways, the institutional services that may be rapidly failing us—health care, education, and government—mirror the commodity object markets that have emerged in consumer electronics and car manufacturing. And the reasons may be the same but made much more acute by the personal interactions necessary in a service: users are more different than the same, cannot be easily segmented or chunked or profiled, and can, with the aid of education and technology, provide the same service offered by the institution, but in a much better fashion.

Dennis Littky sees a future for the application of design in the context of education. He developed the Big Picture, a new approach to K-12 education, which is now extending to college, in an effort to mitigate the enormous dropout rate of at-risk youth (primarily blacks and Hispanics) for whom traditional educational methods of rote memorization simply aren't working. While alternative models for education have existed for a long time, Littky's is one of the first that takes an approach of both depth and scale, and it is this combination that repositions his efforts as “designerly”: He wants to change not only local culture but also the larger infrastructure of education in the United States entirely.

Littky's model doesn't reject educators, and Dubberly isn't calling for the rejection of doctors, teachers, and traditional politicians. In the same way that designers build experience frameworks for people, so too will these professionals begin to control more of the experiential and behavioral qualities of their services. In many ways, this begins to feel like the true democratization of design, and the designers themselves can begin to support other professionals in humanizing the technology associated with their professions.

And so the doctor no longer treats the patient by addressing the discrete symptoms that make up a discrete problem. Instead, they work together to build a lifestyle health plan that's unique for the individual. Why are you getting a cold every other week? What types of food do you eat? Let's observe your exercise routine. Perhaps the doctor will spend a day with a patient, observing her life and proposing changes both nuanced and large.

Teachers no longer teach the students by delivering content to be learned. Instead, they work with students individually to build an educational plan that's unique for the individual. “You learn best visually, by making things? Great—let's apply that in everything from science to physical education. Most interested in things relating to guns and weapons? Fine—we'll use that as a backdrop to describe math and physics.” Nutrition coaches go shopping with clients, watching how they shop and then helping them correct their behavior. Schools like the Big Picture offer the one-on-one learning (and in many cases, one student with three teachers) described above. Clearly, the deinstitutionalized services require a dramatic shift in the number of hours spent between professional and user. But that's a part of the larger trend Hugh describes above—the shift toward an organic-systems view of the world, where efficiency and number of customers served are simply irrelevant metrics to track human services.

This deinstitutionalization—new forms of education, new structures for consulting, and a renewed focus on design for impact—point toward a trend in design away from traditional financial goals and financial structures. Many of those engaged in these initiatives are under 40 years old and have a dramatically different set of life goals than did their parents or grandparents. Career actions that might have seemed absurd even 10 years ago are no longer written off as fundamentally impractical: actions like moving to India or China or another developing country or abandoning a high-profile and well-paying job for a less profitable humanitarian start-up or nonprofit. These types of jobs almost implicitly reject the “family, big house in the suburbs, and a two car garage” that has been the norm since the 50s and fundamentally question the financial yardstick of career success in a profession as dynamic and creative as design. In many ways, the younger generation of designers has abandoned a great deal of the organizational structures that have contained design for years.

The design consultancy has been a fundamental part of the business ecosystem for close to a century. In the consultancy model, designers partner with organizations in the context of a project—a finite creative engagement, usually centered on a particular design problem (the project brief). Designers may produce deliverables for the client, which are then extended, reused, and socialized inside of the corporation. An example might be a brand system, produced to define a set of branding parameters for known products. Once delivered, this brand system can evolve to be applied to new products. Or a design consultancy may focus on a specific product, working within constraints defined by the corporation. Typically, a design consultancy can work faster than a corporation, as the consultant is freed from both the day-to-day minutiae of the corporate setting (endless meetings and conference calls) as well as from the internal politics that plague many large companies. And a designer at a consultancy may benefit from and appreciate the diversity of projects, avoiding burnout and allowing the designer to bring a new frame of reference to a project or problem. Thus, a design consultancy is characteristically fast, targeted, and able to approach problems from fresh perspectives.

A new model of design consultancy is emerging: the nonprofit design consultancy. This form of design agency has all of the aforementioned benefits and focuses exclusively on projects related to social change and impact. Instead of charging hourly rates of $200 and $300, these firms work for free and depend on grants and donations to support their efforts.

Project H is one of the most notable examples of this new approach to design. Founded by Emily Pilloton, Project H is “a team of designers and builders engaging locally to improve the quality of life for the socially overlooked.”⁷⁸ Emily's teams engage in a variety of local work, usually on a not-for-profit basis, and work with local institutions (such as schools or healthcare venues) in order to craft unique solutions to their unique problems. Frequently, with little modification, the solutions that were implemented in one area scale successfully to another, creating the potential for locally inspired global mass dissemination. An example is the learning landscapes project, created by a team of designers that includes Industrial Designer Dan Grossman. The project, “a scalable, grid-based playground system for elementary math education” utilizes physical space and low-cost materials to create a modular system for teaching math. Grossman took on the project to illustrate how design can be democratized. “In today's world it's apparent that good design is a privilege instead of being a right. In order to get good design into the hands of people who need it most you ask many questions, but how much does it pay should not be one of them.”⁷⁹

As Emily describes, the greatest successes in design for social innovation have come from “work that is local, deeply entrenched, long-term, and in our own backyards. I firmly believe that lasting impact requires all three of the following: proximity (simply being there, in the place you seek to design with and for), empathic investment (a personal and emotional stake in collective prosperity), and pervasiveness (the opposite of acupuncture, involvement that has impact at multiple scales).”⁸⁰

A similarly named but entirely unrelated Project M is another example of this model, approaching education and design at a local and activist level. Project M, founded by John Bielenberg, desires to change the world through local, small and targeted projects that involve some form of communal building and, usually, a method of content formalization and dissemination. As an example, Buy A Meter is an attempt to call attention to the lack of clean drinking water in Hale County, Alabama, where one in four households is not connected to the municipal water system. Through their awareness campaign, the effort has raised $45,000, or enough for close to 106 new water meters, appropriate for connecting 106 families to the water system. ⁸¹

Both Project H and Project M take the capabilities that are traditionally employed by designers in for-profit consultancies and recast these in the context of not-for-profit engagements. These are local efforts that follow the design process, including ethnographic research, synthesis, ideation, and some form of productive dissemination, but the goal is not to create forprofit solutions that are mass produced or marketed; instead, it is to solve a local problem with social consequences.

It is not just design that has changed to embrace a new norm of social and humanitarian change. Design education, too, has evolved to focus on these new constructs.

Academic institutions offering master's work in design and innovation instruct and encourage students to explore problems that have a social component. Students may investigate issues of sustainability, or a class project may provide pro bono design services to a local agency or humanitarian group. Additionally, students pursuing a PhD in a design discipline may investigate, in great depth, more complicated social issues such as homelessness or hunger. And in Europe and Asia, Cumulus—the International Association of Universities and Colleges of Art, Design and Media—has been successful in exploring topics of equality and ethics and in driving ethics and humanitarian design education research.

Yet only five United States--based schools participate in Cumulus (of well over 100 total member schools), and there is also a strong tendency for design schools in the United States to embrace the financial allure of business and to offer projects sponsored by large corporations. These projects act as capstones for professional degrees, where non-novice designers come to advance their skills (and often to decompress from the feelings of dishonesty described above).

Austin Center for Design, founded by the author of this text, exists to transform society through design and design education. This transformation occurs through the development of design knowledge directed toward all forms of social and humanitarian problems. Parsons has launched a transdisciplinary program focused on cultural anthropology and bringing together multiple disciplines of design in order to drive problem solving. “We start from the premise that there are certain challenges in the world that are too complex for an individual design discipline to address. So we wanted a place in the curriculum where we could embrace that complexity and use the design process to make a difference.”⁸² These new design programs will train the future generations of designers and will leverage existing momentums in society in order to help continue the extraction of design from the artificial confines of business.

A shift in education creates the opportunity for exponential change over the long term. Design students who, in the 80s, learned human factors and ergonomics as a core of their curriculum have gone on to evangelize for user-centered design in their professions. Similarly, students who learned sustainability as a core competency of design in the past decade now integrate environmentally appropriate techniques in their jobs as a standard practice. By shifting design education away from the confines of business and toward the subject matter of humanitarian problem solving, we can create a generation of designers who expect to work on problems that are meaningful and socially pressing. This requires a continual conversation of judgment and values—a conversation that reiterates that not all problems are equally worth solving.

Victor Papanek noted in his well-known text that “It is the prime function of the designer to solve problems. My own view is that this means that the designer must also be more sensitive in realizing what problems exist.”⁸³ We can choose to work on complicated, multi-faceted problems with the same set of tools used to solve more simplistic problems of form, style, or brand. If designers are capable of shaping the poetic experiences of life, it follows that they are also capable of shaping poor experiences either through lack of skill, poor execution, or simply by selecting inconsequential projects to spend their time on. Consider the value provided by selecting problems related to social, political, or economic stability, and compare this to the design of a consumer-facing online bookstore. Which has a larger value and for whom? It is not the intention to argue against the development of artifacts for consumption and for consumptive products. However, designers need to be truly aware of the repercussions of their choices and to understand that they are, in fact, designing simply by selecting to spend their time within a certain discipline or genre of problem solving.

In all of these examples—the wicked problems of health care, developing countries, education—a subtle philosophical shift occurs. Designing is no longer about producing something for someone else to consume, where the designer acts independent of a situation and with a target audience's best interests in mind. Instead, design is now about designing with other people. The role of an interaction designer is less about creating a beautiful, appropriate, or even usable form or artifact. Instead, the designer now plays the role of facilitator and translator, one with deep material expertise and the ability to make connections between a wide range of seemingly disconnected ideas. Design becomes a public activity, and the designer is now the choreographer.

Co-design or participatory design methods require that nondesigners—people who are not trained in producing new ideas or visualizing these ideas—are given both an environment and a toolkit from which to create. This is the act of facilitation: of fostering a collaborative environment where nondesigners feel comfortable making design decisions or recommendations. A strong facilitator can understand and anticipate group dynamics, can effectively leverage a long period of time (sometimes a week or more) in a way that is efficient and productive, and can make all participants feel comfortable. Similarly, when nondesigners are given enough basic tools, they can create representations of their ideas in enough detail that they can confidently explain, rationalize, and argue for a particular design.

While facilitating a group session, an interaction designer begins to act as a translator, both visualizing ideas as they are developed and refined and also translating vague descriptions, gestures, or references to new ideas into more actionable, concrete representations. To do this effectively, a designer leverages deep material expertise to anticipate which ideas will work, how to adjust an idea to be more successful, and how to best represent an idea in a manner that can be explored further. The medium that an interaction designer manipulates is human behavior, and the material that is frequently leveraged is a digital fabric: bits, bytes, pixels, and processors. During a facilitated session, the designer leans heavily on personal experiences with digital artifacts and an understanding of how people commonly use or consider these tools.

It is interesting to consider the implications of a design that allows regular people—people who don't claim to be artists and may rarely get a chance to create much of anything at all—to be creative and to experience the mindful state of flow described earlier. Imagine the idea of design empowering regular people to create and to experience the joy and personal satisfaction that comes with the development of a new idea and the embodiment of that idea in something tangible. This idea that non-designers can be creative if provided with the proper tools is at the heart of psychologist Liz Sanders’ work on participatory design and design toolkits. As she describes, including non-designers in cocreation “at the early front end of the design development process can have an impact with positive, long-range consequences.”⁸⁴ Sanders describes how toolkits of rudimentary parts can be created and utilized by people who have no formal design training to give them the voice and vehicle necessary to create. Lego blocks allow people to easily produce shapes and structures without engineering knowledge, and in a similar fashion, design toolkits allow people to easily produce artifacts without an understanding of design principles.

Moving from designing for to designing with is challenging but similar in magnitude to the change many designers experienced moving from designing the physical to designing the digital. The old design process was still applicable, but specific skills and techniques were no longer necessary or appropriate, and in many cases, an entirely new language was necessary to support the new digital problems facing stakeholders. Some designers made this shift successfully, while others struggled to remain relevant in a world that suddenly looked very different. Designing with will threaten traditional methods and designers who are hesitant to adapt and who haven't completely embraced a humanitarian approach to design. But simultaneously, a new generation of designers is learning the ability to facilitate large creative exercises with end users, to convert data into actionable insights, to speak to the material challenges presented by these new design problems, and to forge connections between seemingly disparate subject matter in the context of wicked problem solving.