Wicked Design

Marback, Richard. “Embracing Wicked Problems: The Turn to Design in Composition Studies.” CCC 61.2 (2009): W397-W419. Print.

In this sometimes dense piece, Richard Marback traces the recent turns to design in composition studies brought about by the increasing emphasis on digital technologies and multimodal text production, and he strongly supports this shift. He notes that since the 1990s, critique has hindered students’ ability to have agency in the texts they produce. His call, then, is for composition to move beyond critique and to adopt design as a way to give greater agency to our students in the production of their texts.

But his goals for design are precise: As the title suggests, he wants design to “embrac[e] wicked problems.” These “wicked problems” convey the notion that producing any artifact is a constant tension between previous iterations of that artifact, the designer’s goals, the audience’s potential responses to it, the interrelations of its constituent parts, and the designer’s negotiations of these tensions. Wicked problems, then, are provisional, ambiguous, and not ultimately solvable; designers can only meet the challenges of a particular situation through “an embrace of ambiguities in our responses to each other with and through our artifacts” (W418).

He also traces recent scholarship on the use of design in composition studies, examining the works of Gunther Kress, the New London Group, Richard Buchanan, Diana George, and Mary Hocks (among others). He sees in them some valiant efforts to promote the types of design considerations he advocates, but notes that these efforts tend to fall short of actively and thoroughly espousing the realities of wicked problems in design. They fail, by his accounts, by reducing design and analysis to textual terms, by not fully acknowledging the complexity of design, or by relying too much on the language of critique. He calls on instructors to view design as “a problem of ambiguity and indeterminacy in audience and purpose, a problem of struggling with our abilities to respond to artifacts, with the capacity in our artifacts to respond to us, as well as the problem of our responsibility we have as designers for the abilities of our artifacts to respond and elicit responses from others” (W415). He next provides us with a sample assignment, illustrating how students might consider and engage wicked problems.

Often, maybe too often, recent arguments about the need to incorporate design into composition studies seem to reduce practices to sets of principles that suggest relatively easy solutions or place multimodality in textual terms, neglecting their breadth and depth of appeals and designs. In other circumstances, design or rhetorical terms are invoked as a solution (even an easy solution) to the complexities of multimodal text production. Marback, despite engaging in something he faults others for (suggesting “wicked problems” as a sort of panacea), reminds us of the true complexity of producing effective texts and pushes against the tendency toward simplifying what design entails.