I guess design sometimes deals with problems that are wicked in
Rittel's original sense of the word, and sometimes not.
A related way to think, which has proven more generative to me in
terms of process management, is to say that design is about learning.
What you do as a designer, and particularly in early, explorative
phases, is to learn as much as possible. You want to learn about what
the design space looks like, how the "problem" can be framed in
different ways (sometimes equal to different kinds of transformations
from an existing situation), what possible "solutions" there might
be, what qualities you might expect from those "solutions" if they
were deployed.
This kind of learning is normally not limited by inherent bounds of
the design space. There is always another idea that could be
explored, always another way to rephrase the "problem".
Hence, in my experience, you do not work broadly and divergently in
order to increase your certainty as much as in order to reduce your
uncertainty.
And the question of when we have enough is often answered by other
means, such as when time and resources devoted to exploration are
exhausted. At that point, we have to obey the 80/20 rule and hope for
good-enough.
Sorry if this comes across as too academic and Zen-like, but this is
actually how I tend to think about my work and my teaching.
Jonas Löwgren
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