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Dating Platforms & Verification
A Pandora’s box of wicked problems
I’m often asked how I ended up doing what I do. The short answer: I wanted to build a dating and social discovery platform. I had trademarked the name. Mapped out the user journey. Designed the matching logic. I had a small, talented team on board to make it happen, and a plan to run it as a non-profit. My research, though, kept running into a wicked problem I couldn’t solve. Verification.
Verification is a wicked problem in Rittel and Webber’s (1973) sense because it has no definitive formulation, no stopping rule that tells you when it is solved, and solutions that are good or bad rather than true or false.
It bugged me enough that I pulled up the handbrake: until I could solve it, I wouldn’t build the platform. In the process, I found a paradox. This article is about that paradox.
Here’s the backstory
My background is in design, a mixture of graphics, digital, publishing, and that usual bag of design for “everyday things.” I have Silvio Lorusso (2023) to thank for What Design Can’t Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion, because his descriptions of what design is and isn’t spoke to my identity crisis as a designer, and made me feel more at home than anything I had read to date.
