I've just finished giving the Herbert Simon lectures at the AIECON center at National Chengchi University inTaipei, Taiwan, with K. Vela Velupillai.
The lectures themselves are archived here. I'd like to thank Professor Shu-Heng Chen, the Director of the Center, for the invitation to speak, and for the hospitality he and his staff and students have shown me while I'm here. I gave them a bottle of this to say thanks.
I had to search a bit, since the nextd.org web site is down at the moment. But I recommend these two papers available still from a wikipedia page on 'wicked problems'. Conklin and VanPatter make the observation, there was a west coast and an east coast school of thinking (which developed independently of one another and did not interact) dealing with the same problems at the same time. Melvin Weber and Horst Rittel worked together at Berkley California.
Conklin, Jeff, Min Basadur, and GK VanPatter; Rethinking Wicked Problems: Unpacking Paradigms, Bridging Universes (Part 1), NextDesign Leadership Institute Journal, 2007.
Conklin, Jeff, Min Basadur, and GK VanPatter; Rethinking Wicked Problems: Unpacking Paradigms, Bridging Universes (Part 2), NextDesign Leadership Institute Journal, 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
Some other material by Conklin here:
http://www.cognexus.org/id26.htm
It is very influenced by Webber and Rittel from the Berkley school, which really is a counterpoint to what Herb Simon was doing at the time.
Thanks for the links Brian, will read with interest!
Stephen
Frederick P. Brooks gave a Turing Award lecture back in 2001 at a Siggraph conference. I have the video somewhere on a CDROM. It is one of those things that gets lost on the web for good, and no trace is left. I must put together a full transcript some time and put it up. Brooks knew Herb Simon, Donal Schon and many, many more of the people in early design theory etc. In the lecture he shared a lot of experiences of talking to those men. There is something on Fred Brooks on YouTube of you just type in the name.
Cheers Brian, your comment reminded me to pick up a paperback of 'the design of design', which is out now: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Essays-Computer-Scientist/dp/0201362988
Yeah, I was trying to persuade Fred a while back to read 'Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning'. Even though he was busy still writing the essays. I am delighted to see Jeff Conklin and Horst Rittel made it into the final draft, judging by the people index of the book. 'Design of Design' was the name of Brooks' Turing Award lecture back at Siggraph in 2001. Like someone once said, a lecture is a spoken book. Fred took a look at my summary of Dublin Airport Authority's program management methods a while back, as an example of a complex design and implementation. I posted it up on my blog a while back.
http://designcomment.blogspot.com/2009/06/dublin-airport-authoritys-capital.html