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Assessment of structuredness of problems in design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2024

Sanjay Singh  and
Amaresh Chakrabarti
Sanjay Singh*
Affiliation:
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
Amaresh Chakrabarti
Affiliation:
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
*
sanjaysingh@iisc.ac.in

Abstract

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Design problems are wicked in nature. Wicked problems are difficult to understand, formulate and solve. The literature focuses mainly on the characteristics of wicked problems, very little is available to how wicked problems (synonymous to ill-structured) should be formulated to make them well structured. Assessment of wickedness can help designers formulate problems into well-structured. This work proposes a metric for (lack of) structuredness as a measure for the degree to which a design problem is ill-structured. A Delphi-based method as benchmark for validating the metric is also proposed.

Keywords

design processproblem solvingwickednessill-structuredstructuredness
Type
Human Behaviour and Design Creativity
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society , Volume 4: DESIGN 2024 , May 2024 , pp. 1085 - 1094
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
The Author(s), 2024.

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