Life as a one-shot operation

Industry does not behoove humanity in matters of personal care. In retrospect, I should have prefaced the "unveiling" of my website with an "under construction" or "work in progress" disclaimer.

I was thrilled to bring together many disparate facets of what I do together, enough that I figured I'd share it with some friends, and post it elsewhere online.  I thought there'd be a small handful of people who'd check it out and did not anticipate so many page views within four days, some of which come from countries where I don't personally know anyone (i.e. the Netherlands and Austria).  Thank you for your curiosity!

I missed a tremendous opportunity to introduce some ideas I really care about and live for to a lot of people with a bang. Lesson learned. For anyone interested, I updated the about section with my take on sustainability as an ethos and substantiating the claims in my tagline (ongoing work in progress but I assure you there's reason for their presence), it's in live-first draft form right now.

Among other topics, I researched the concept of "wicked problems" this winter (you can see the powerpoint I made for a presentation on Leading Sustainability in Higher Education which briefly touches on "wicked problems").

The best description for a "wicked problem" I've found recently is this:

A wicked problem is one for which each attempt to create a solution changes the understanding of the problem. Wicked problems cannot be solved in a traditional linear fashion, because the problem definition evolves as new possible solutions are considered and/or implemented. The term was originally coined byHorst Rittel.
Wicked problems always occur in a social context -- the wickedness of the problem reflects the diversity among the stakeholders in the problem. ( source and other interesting stuff here: http://www.cognexus.org/id42.htm )

I wrote a bit about them and used some of Rittel's papers in my capstone research paper too:

“Wicked problems” are a special kind of problem that is dynamic (always changing and continuously happening) and unusually complicated, though they can be common and pervasive. Wicked problems frequently relate to real-life/death issues that have so many moving parts to them that even defining the problem is a serious challenge. The “wicked problems” concept was originally introduced in organizational behavior theory and characterized with ten conditions by Rittel and Weber of MIT (1967), and refined by Rittel in 1973:

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem (defining wicked problems is itself a wicked problem).
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly.
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.
10. The planner has no right to be wrong (planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).

Rittel sums up wicked problems as a "class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing." 

Life is a lot like this too. So long as we live, the things that constitute and define our presence don't really stop, and the consequences of our actions continue to influence others even after we're gone.  The challenge is to recognize your intentions, actions, consequences, and how consequences from other events and peoples' actions might shape your own intentions.  This is a fundamental process of design ( see Ben Eli's semi-powerpoint/paper thing on design at the Buckminster Fuller Institute, I use terms garnered from an ethics class, but the concepts are fundamentally alike).

In this case, the site was originally intended to serve as a comprehensive portfolio (which is a barebones portal to existing social media sites that keep things I made).  I threw it together in haste (over the weekend following example from facebook's hack-together for prompt delivery development story) so that the Ann Arbor Artisan's market would have something better to link to.

I realized I ought to present the pithier and more distinctive bits about my life and want to make it worth other peoples' time.  I hope and believe that many of the things I appreciate, create, learn, and do can help and inspire others to do good things in the world.  If you visit or already have, I hope there's something useful or inspiring for you there now or sometime soon.

Additional Resources:

Wikipedia actually helped me a lot when I was trying to grasp what a "wicked problem was".  The source papers, one is about design theory from the MIT press, are cited in the wikipedia description too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

You can read a book about wicked problems online for free:
https://www.wickedproblems.com/