We have already talked a few times about the importance of phenomenology for Service Design. In 1972, the link between phenomenology and design reached the next level.

It seems that in 1972, Horst Rittel and Melvin M. Webber were among the first to coin the notion of Wicked Problems. Horst was also a guy with a critical bend of mind, and unlike his predecessors, he believed that human experience and perception is the key to the design process. In an article that has already been cited, Jo Szczepanska says that it is through the work of Horst that “[for] the first time Phenomenology was introduced to the designing of experiences”. If you remember, we dated phenomenology back to 1913 and the work of Edmund Husserl.

A Wicked Problem is a societal problem that is so big and difficult that it seems nearly impossible to fix. There are four reasons that make a problem a Wicked Problem:

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