Response 6

For this week’s readings, we had to read an article titled ‘Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving.’ For starters I was very interested in this set of articles. The term ‘wicked problems’ were brought up in the last set of readings, but I didn’t really understand what they were. So I was excited to get an answer to what they are. To start, the author, Jon Kollo, explains what a wicked problem is. A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as man as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, an the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems. The example that Jon Kollo put is poverty, and I think that is an excellent example. I personally have Benn lucky and privileged enough that I haven’t personally experienced this, but I do understand it. In order to ‘fix’ this problem, you would need to do many, many reforms on many things. Changing the minimum wages across the country, make sure that everyone has access to healthcare, make it that people can receive a higher education, incentivizing people to get a GED or high school diploma, and so much more. Each of those changes are very large systematic changes that need to go through many different government officials, meeting, and voting that it could take 4 years just to pass a single one of these things. The author then goes into taking about Horst Rittel and his ten characteristic of a wicked problem. These 10 characteristic seems to break it down really well. The author then explains what are large scale distractions.
Basically, a large scale distraction is a way to try to shift focus off that problem and focus on something else. This is down by the elite and the powerful. I really fell out of love with this article, because it felt I was reading information that we all knew but was spiced up to make it seem different. I’m not sure.
After that one, the next video was ‘Design a Force for Social Impact’ by Doug Powell. This is again something that I’m not, because I love the designing for social impact class with Eve. This is something that we touched on lightly and was very eyeopening and informative. I thought it was interesting when he talked about when his wife was diagnosed with diabetes and received a multitude of informative documents, but they were all so hard to read and comprehend. They where not designed in a way for the person affected to really understand the material, it was just a bunch of medical documents. He and his wife saw that sane issue across all facets of the medical field and decided to make a company named healthsimple to fix it. The redesigned those take at home papers, and added color, pictures, typography and more. They saw a problem and took the steps to fix it, which started a chain of fixing a larger scale problem with the medical industry.