According to design theorist Keller Easterling, solutions are part of the problem. When we innovate only in terms of a solutionist framework, Easterling argues in her book Medium Design, we optimize for static outcomes wedded to the status quo of product-market fit. Solutions are one-time fixes, usually implemented by someone else, which break as soon as the context they’re responding to changes (which it does, constantly). Solutions are blunt tools in the face of a reality that is interdependent and always evolving.
In lieu of such app-for-that thinking, Easterling advocates that we design for “protocols of interplay,” prizing relationships over neatly separated objects, complexity over co...