Horst Rittel

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 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.