---
id: people/horst-rittel
about:
  label: Horst Rittel
  description: >-
    German design theorist (1930 to 1990) at Berkeley and Stuttgart who, with
    Melvin Webber, set out wicked problems in planning and devised the IBIS
    method.
  tags:
    - wicked problems
    - design theory
    - planning
person:
  affiliation: 'University of California, Berkeley'
  role: design theorist
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Horst Rittel - Wikipedia
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Rittel'
    - title: >-
        Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning - Rittel and Webber, Policy
        Sciences 4 (1973), 155-169
      url: >-
        https://archive.epa.gov/reg3esd1/data/web/pdf/rittel%2bwebber%2bdilemmas%2bgeneral_theory_of_planning.pdf
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Horst Rittel was a design theorist, born in Berlin on 14 July 1930 and died in Heidelberg on 9 July 1990.[^1] He was professor of design methodology at the Ulm School of Design from 1958 to 1963.[^1] From 1963 until his death he was professor of the science of design at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1973 he was also a professor in the Faculty for Architecture and Town Planning at the University of Stuttgart.[^1] He counted planning, engineering and policy making as forms of design.[^1]

He popularised the term wicked problem in the mid-1960s for the ill-defined problems of planning.[^1] He and [Melvin Webber](/people/melvin-webber/) published "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" in Policy Sciences in 1973.[^2] It argues that the search for scientific bases for social policy is bound to fail, because policy problems are wicked and science has developed to deal with tame ones.[^2] Such problems cannot be definitively described, and there are no solutions "in the sense of definitive and objective answers".[^2] For working on them he devised the issue-based information system (IBIS), conceived in 1968, a method that structures design as argument over issues.[^1]

The 1973 paper is discussed in the article on [Bogucki's critique of incrementalism](/articles/bogucki-incrementalism-complexity/).