In my previous posts in this series, I've been exploring design's relationship to intangible materials - Krippendorff's trajectory from products to discourses, the metaphors that shape how we imagine AI systems, and the counterfactual thinking that enables us to imagine alternatives. Today I want to focus on something more structural: the dichotomies that organise design thinking itself.
This matters because when we talk about "designing with social materials" - as opposed to physical materials like wood or steel - we need ways of thinking about what kind of thing we're working with. Is vocational rehabilitation a "material" practice or an "immaterial" one? Are we working with what "is" or what "ought to be"? Are we focused on the "known" or reaching toward the "unknown"?
Is and Ought
Herbert Simon, in The Sciences of the Artificial, drew a famous distinction that has shaped how we think about design's relationship to other disciplines:
"The natural sciences are concerned with how things are… design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be" (Simon, cited in Resnick, 2019, p. 19).
This framing positions design as fundamentally normative rather than descriptive. Science describes what exists; design imagines what should exist. Science is about facts; design is about values.
The distinction is useful, but it can obscure as much as it reveals. In practice, understanding "how things are" and imagining "how things ought to be" are not separate activities. Every design intervention requires understanding the current situation - not just its physical characteristics but its social dynamics, power structures, institutional constraints. And every attempt to understand a situation is shaped by what we imagine might be different about it.
At SCÖ, this is particularly evident. The project nominally aims to "improve" vocational rehabilitation through "data science" and "federated learning". But what does "improve" mean? Faster job placements? Better job matches? More sustainable employment? Reduced costs? These are not technical questions with technical answers. They are normative questions about what vocational rehabilitation should achieve - questions that are contested among the various stakeholders in the system.
Material and Immaterial
Mads Nygaard Folkmann, in The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design, proposes a set of dichotomies for understanding how designers work with meaning. The first is the distinction between material and immaterial:
"I address this in relation to three dichotomies: the material character of the design, that is, its material or immaterial extension" (Folkmann, 2013, p. 7).
Traditional design works with material objects - chairs, buildings, interfaces. But increasingly, design also works with immaterial things: services, experiences, policies, systems. This isn't just a shift in what designers make; it's a shift in how design thinking operates.
Folkmann argues that even material objects contain an "imaginary" dimension - a layer of meaning that exceeds their physical presence:
"The imaginary can be seen as the resulting process of a double process of applying negation and opening up to a new dimension of possibility" (Folkmann, 2013, p. 12).
This is a sophisticated way of saying that design objects point beyond themselves. A chair is not just wood and fabric; it carries meanings about comfort, status, belonging. An AI system is not just code and data; it carries imaginings about efficiency, objectivity, progress.
In vocational rehabilitation, the "materials" we work with are almost entirely immaterial: policies, procedures, relationships, expectations, identities. The question is whether design methods developed for material objects can translate to these immaterial domains - or whether the translation itself transforms what "design" means.
Actual and Possible
Folkmann's second key dichotomy is between the actual and the possible:
"The ontology of design [is] defined as the span of the actual and the possible" (Folkmann, 2013, p. 13).
Design operates in the gap between what is and what might be. This connects directly to the counterfactual thinking I discussed in my previous post - but Folkmann adds something important. He suggests that design objects themselves can embody possibility, can point toward alternatives, can make the possible tangible:
"In their physical and material intension, design objects are actual entities that give character and structure to the world of phenomena" (Folkmann, 2013, p. 13).
The designed object is actual - it exists in the world. But it also carries traces of the possible - the imaginative work that brought it into being and the futures it might enable.
This has implications for how we think about design artefacts in vocational rehabilitation. A "concept map" or a "service blueprint" is not just a representation of how things are. It's an actualisation of possibility - a way of making visible alternatives that might otherwise remain unarticulated. But this also means that every design artefact is partial, perspectival, shaped by the imagination that produced it.
Known and Unknown
Folkmann proposes three "mental settings" that structure the designer's imagination. The first is the dichotomy of known and unknown:
"In this section, I present three dichotomies that offer a basic foundation for a design-specific schematization of experience" (Folkmann, 2013, p. 11).
Design thinking requires working at the interface between what we know and what we don't yet know. If we only work with the known, we reproduce existing solutions. If we leap entirely into the unknown, we lose the grounding that makes design practical.
Folkmann emphasises that this interface is productive:
"A mental setting... that embraces an interface between known and unknown may make it possible to let the inner space of imagining develop into something new in the design process" (Folkmann, 2013, p. 12).
This resonates with what I'm experiencing at SCÖ. There's enormous pressure to work only with the "known" - existing data, established methods, proven approaches. The promise of "data science" is precisely that it works with what exists, what can be measured, what's already captured in databases. But the most important questions about vocational rehabilitation may lie in the unknown - in experiences that aren't captured by current data systems, in possibilities that haven't been imagined, in alternative configurations of the system that no one has tried.
Whole and Detail / Focus and Defocus
Folkmann's other two dichotomies - whole versus detail and focusing versus defocusing - describe the shifting attention that characterises design thinking. Sometimes we zoom in on specifics; sometimes we zoom out to see patterns. Sometimes we sharpen our focus; sometimes we deliberately blur it to see new connections.
These shifts in attention are not arbitrary. They're ways of moving between levels of analysis, between the concrete and the abstract, between the particular and the general. And they're essential for working with "wicked problems" - the class of problems that Richard Buchanan argues are central to design thinking.
Wicked Problems
Buchanan, building on Horst Rittel's work, argues that design addresses a particular kind of problem:
"Wicked problems are 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'" (Rittel, cited in Buchanan, 1992, p. 15).
This is a remarkably accurate description of vocational rehabilitation. The problem is ill-formulated - is it about employment outcomes? wellbeing? capability development? cost reduction? The information is confusing - data systems don't talk to each other, outcomes are hard to measure, causation is unclear. There are many decision-makers with conflicting values - the Public Employment Service, the Social Insurance Agency, municipalities, healthcare providers, employers, and the clients themselves.
Buchanan argues that wicked problems cannot be solved through linear analysis:
"The linear model of design thinking is based on determinate problems which have definite conditions. The designer's task is to identify those conditions precisely and then calculate a solution. In contrast, the wicked-problems approach suggests that there is a fundamental indeterminacy in all but the most trivial design problems" (Buchanan, 1992, p. 15).
This is directly relevant to the AI/ML framing at SCÖ. Machine learning assumes determinate problems - patterns in data that can be identified and optimised. But vocational rehabilitation is fundamentally indeterminate. The "conditions" are not fixed; they change as we intervene. The "solution" is not calculable; it emerges through negotiation among stakeholders with different interests.
Implications for SCÖ
These dichotomies help articulate a persistent discomfort with the project's framing. There's a persistent assumption that vocational rehabilitation can be treated as a determinate problem - that we can analyse the data, identify patterns, and calculate improvements. But every dichotomy I've discussed suggests otherwise:
- Is/Ought: The project assumes we know what "better" means, but this is contested
- Material/Immaterial: The project treats rehabilitation as data (material), but the work is fundamentally about meaning (immaterial)
- Actual/Possible: The project focuses on what is (existing data), not what might be (alternative futures)
- Known/Unknown: The project works with what's captured in databases, not what lies outside them
- Determinate/Indeterminate: The project assumes calculable solutions, but the problems are wicked
Perhaps this is why "design" feels so awkward in this context. The dichotomies that structure design thinking are precisely the dimensions that the project's framing collapses. If design operates in the gap between is and ought, actual and possible, known and unknown - then a project that treats these as resolved has no space for design.
My role might be to re-open these dichotomies. Not to impose design solutions, but to create space for the imaginative work that the technical framing has foreclosed. To ask: what should vocational rehabilitation achieve? What possibilities lie beyond the current data? What do we not yet know about this work?
References
Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. Design Issues, 8(2), 5-21.
Folkmann, M. N. (2013). The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design. MIT Press.
Resnick, E. (Ed.). (2019). The Social Design Reader. Bloomsbury.