Most designers I know speak about their work in this frame. I’ve been thinking about this recently and I don’t believe it’s true.
To frame the design process as problem-solving suggests there’s a large degree of predictability in the path forward but if you ask any seasoned designer the exact opposite is true – that the process is largely unknown due to the number of personalities involved in a specific domain for a company with very unique constraints and a specific timeline to do it in. That’s a lot of unique variables in the mix and I’m just scratching the surface.
So why then do designers describe their work as solving a problem? The reason that immediately springs to mind is to make design more palatable, and indeed, feel less risky for all others involved. Proposing a framework like the double diamond makes design feel like a recipe for success when it is in fact merely an aspiration or goal in disguise.
And so in comes the professionals then, people for hire that are capable of helping businesses solve all their problems like a team of freelance design power rangers.
It’s all horseshit.
Design when framed as problem-solving is a tool for consultants, agencies, schools, and bootcamps to market design like an attractive commodity: an easy to follow sequence of steps that can change corporate destinies. In this context, design gets reduced to a process of validation and feedback seeking for a fixed, unchanging plan in the form of a problem to be solved. And for who? For what agenda?
Too many designers blindly follow the steps without deliberating about the possibilities currently in front of them to inform the thing they do. What should be rejected right here and now? What should be pursued further?
So if we think of design more as way to triage or create new possibilities, then it becomes more about understanding the systems we operate in and the relationships we have with them, then using design to adjust the frame in which we create meaning – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot – to influence and regulate those systems as our societies, technologies, and environments change. By seeking new possibilities, designers retain their agency.
Put this way, it’s much less neat and tidy isn’t it? That’s design in practice. Rendering decisions to maintain or change systems to meet our intentions. Let's try to make sure they're good ones.