Problem solving vs. paradigm shifting
While digging through some early academic work on design, I found an old presentation that still feels surprisingly relevant to the challenges we’re helping our partners navigate today. It wrestles with an idea at the center of strategic design—and at the core of our work at Public Works: Sometimes, the biggest barrier to innovation isn’t what we don’t know. It’s what we think we’ve already figured out.
The excerpt below explores design not just as a tool for solving problems, but as a practice of asking better questions—of intentionally [un]learning what no longer serves us so we can reimagine what’s possible. It’s dense (as old academic writing tends to be), but the thinking behind it feels more timely than ever.
Here’s the original version, followed by some reflections on how these concepts apply to our work today—from rethinking senior living to redesigning cognitive health experiences.
Sometimes, the biggest barrier to innovation isn’t what we don’t know. It’s what we think we do.
WRITTEN IN COLLABORATION WITH ZACHARY KAISER, PROF. DESIGN MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY & PRESENTED AT THE 3RD INTERNATIONAL CUMULUS DESIGN EDUCATION RESEARCHERS IN 2015
By harnessing design as a means to ask questions, we can begin to [un]learn: to investigate, [dis]assemble, and [re]frame the [in]visible infrastructures or wayshowing strategies embedded in our everyday. As a transdisciplinary praxis of explication, [un]learning is constructed on an inverted analytic framework that regards questions as solutions—opportunities for reflection and adaptation. Such questions do not seek answers, but understanding and more nuanced questions.
Understanding the dialectics between power and knowledge is central to the praxis of [un]learning as a critical pedagogy that questions that which has been learned. To this end, it is necessary to identify and [dis]assemble the [in]visible infrastructures that support both power and knowledge, including our cognitive maps. Through this process of dialectical [dis]orientation or wayfinding, individuals develop the capacity to orient themselves within a given context by designing new maps both of and for space and action.
[Un]learning foregrounds difference and dissonance as vehicles to foster accountability and adaptation by aligning theories of action, in action at various scales (Argyris & Schön, 1974; Lefebvre, 2014). Here—as opposed to the practice of wayshowing that O’Neill demonstrated with Muzak—affect is harnessed as a means to stimulate “a physical system’s ’grappling’ with variance in order to resist the inertia of its ongoing mechanics” (Rudrauf & Damasio, 2005, p. 236). Acknowledging, in real time, the linkage between behavior and affect and the factors influencing both is a process of thinking in action or double-loop learning through which the governing variables or preferred situations of an individual, organization, or institution can be identified and critically challenged (Argyris & Schön, 1974). In this, doubt becomes the primary vector for critical thinking that challenges the authority and aesthetics of what we’ve come to know as common sense.
Creating systemic change is contingent upon challenging existing paradigms (Meadows, 2008). Yet, the highest leverage point in creating systemic change, is “to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is ‘true,’ that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension...It is to let go into the not-knowing” (Meadows, 2008, p. 164).
As design educators, we develop tactics for everyday [dis]engagement that facilitate [un]learning or not-knowing through dialectical [dis]orientation. Each mind-body-space mash-up seeks to tune up perceptual affordances, so that individuals can tune out of habitual patterns, and tune in to a heightened environmental awareness. Each tactic seeks to: expose latent assumptions; unveil the structure, operations, and context of the corresponding infrastructures; and, ultimately, disrupt the dominant order—rendering it as one possibility amongst many (Nash, 2014).
The practice of [un]learning is as elusive as the everyday.* Therefore, the capacity for [un]learning to advance critical thinking is contingent upon frequent disruption to the rhythms that modulate our minds and bodies—engaging and [dis]engaging, learning and [un]learning, by design. (Nash, 2014).
An underlying assumption in the development of [un]learning is that, over time, learning—be it actively or passively via environment, culture, and identity—actually inhibits our capacities to innovate. Choreographer Lucy Guerin provides an illuminating demonstration of this assumption in Untrained, a performance in which: "Four men take to the stage. Two of these men are highly skilled, experienced dancers and two are acclaimed visual artists with no movement training whatsoever. The complex, refined movements that one man can do with ease, another can only approximate. All are given the same instructions. It’s how they execute them displays an individual portrait of each man’s character, as well as an unavoidable comparison between the participants. It’s the evolution of information, built up through units of action, that shows what they have in common and where their physical histories set them apart." (Guerin, 2012)
