Wicked problems, Design & Horst Rittel

by | Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Matt Koehler and I have often talked about the wicked problems of design and teaching with technology (most specifically in our handbook chapter on TPACK). We take the idea of wicked problems from a classic paper written by Rittel and Weber back in 1973. As Wikipedia says, Rittel was “a pioneering theorist of design and planning, and late professor at the University of California, Berkeley.” Rittel’s writings are often hard to get hold of since he published in a range of journals across multiple domains. Professor Ellen Do at Georgia Tech has created a webpage with links and downloadable PDFs of many of Rittel’s works. Check it out here.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Alien games paper, published

I had posted earlier that a paper on gender and video games had been accepted for publication. Well, it is published now, full reference, abstract and link to PDF given below. Heeter, C., Egidio, R., Mishra, P., Winn, B., & Winn, J. (2008). Alien Games: Do girls...

Of certainty & doubt

The NYTimes has a op-ed piece today by Max Blumenthal about an obscure letter Eisenhower wrote to "Robert Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran." Biggs was worried by ambiguity and uncertainty he seemed to observe in president Eisenhower. He wrote that he:...

Contemplating Design: Remixing the 5 spaces framework

Contemplating Design: Remixing the 5 spaces framework

The Five Spaces for Design in Education framework argues that design in education happens in 5 interrelated spaces: artifacts, processes, experiences, systems and culture. We have typically represented this as follows. We, however, are also very aware that any...

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

What better way to wish everybody Merry Christmas than with a custom ambigram. The design above, reads Christmas when reflected in a mirror (a wall-reflection) or from either side of the page. For instance imagine printing it on a glass door - it would...

Website problems

My website has been facing all kinds of problems over the past few weeks. We have been working on figuring out what went wrong and trying to ensure that it doesn't recur - but it has taken a while and it's not clear to us whether we have it all figured out. So the...

TPACK Newsletter #21: September 2014

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #21 (September, 2014) Welcome to the twenty-first edition of the (approximately bimonthly) TPACK Newsletter! TPACK work is continuing worldwide. This document contains recent updates to that work that we hope will be interesting and useful to...

Going cuckoo!

Three different news-stories/articles came to my notice today all connected by the infamous brood parasite the cuckoo. The first is a part of Olivia Judson's blog (on the NYTimes) on biology and life (read Cuckoo! Cuckoo! here), the second is is about how scientists...

Jared Diamond on creativity, innovation and wealth

Jared Diamond has an article on edge.org, somewhat provocatively titled: How to get rich? The question his after is simply, "what is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation,...

1 Comment

  1. Cherice Montgomery

    Thanks, Punya! This was very helpful to one of my students who is doing some research on critical thinking!

    Reply

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