Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: a Strategic Design Vocabulary

Thus, design must make clear that its remit is expanded from simply problem-solving to context-setting.

In 1964, the Swiss designer Karl Gerstner wrote “To describe the problem is part of the solution.” A few years later, Norman Potter reinforced why this is necessary simply from the point of view of efficacy.

And yet we see system failure all around us. For all its strengths and successes, the UK’s National Health Service, said to be the third largest organisation in the world, will not have been designed to produce lengthy waiting times and overly full triage centres, yet that is what we see. The system has been designed in enormous detail, from a policy perspective, and often works like a

Culture is not something that can be designed, after all; is it even ethical to consider that it could be

Who is the client for climate change, except perhaps the entire human race

Yet put yourself into that (admittedly unlikely) scenario and the most likely course of action would be to improvise: to feel around in the dark, while listening carefully

he collapse of knowledge, of authority, of institution can leave a dizzying sensation, a kind of vertiginous drop into an abyss of uncertainty. W

The issue here is something rarely considered at school: what do you do when you realise you are addressing the wrong problem, your bounded remit having been the outcome of the wrong question in the first place? T

n which designers have a lot to learn and a lot to prove.

We need to find productive ways of articulating questions in order to better understand the nature of the problems we now face, in terms of the architecture of the problem.