Design is all about Navigating Ambiguity. When we give our students complex, open-ended, real-world challenges, they must both uncover and identify meaningful “problems” to solve, as well as figure out how to solve them in innovative ways.

The core ability that allows students to do this is Navigating Ambiguity (read about the other design abilities). This ability of thriving in a messy world of parallel possibilities equips learners to both discern and creatively solve complex human challenges. Ultimately, students learn to lean into ambiguity (rather than fear it), because they come to see it as an opportunity.

Ambiguous terrain takes exploration to understand. Explore by playing with the filters below to find resources that will help guide you (and those you teach or lead) on your journey navigating ambiguity. You’ll discover resources that come from both outside and inside the d.school, and have been designed and/or submitted by different folks within our teaching community, students, and broader network. We've designed each resource page so that you can read about what we’ve tried, riff on the content to make it your own, and then share it with others.

For now, let’s talk about just one of those eight abilities, the super ability — navigating ambiguity. This essential ability involves recognizing and stewing in the discomfort of not knowing, leveraging and embracing parallel possibilities, and resolving or emerging from ambiguity as needed. Navigating ambiguity is essential for both problem-finding and problem-solving.

Designers are already fearless explorers of uncertainty. Projects, process, and people are inherently ambiguous but designers find patterns in information. They re-frame problems, examine possibility, and make meaning. Ambiguity makes creative work extremely challenging to do well but can also lead to the greatest opportunities.

So how do you know when you’re deep in the woods with no map and navigating ambiguity?

• You feel comfortable holding multiple directions of a project in parallel
• You ask or surface more questions than answers
• You identify and explore opposing tensions (and potential outcomes) for your work
• You navigate the steps in your project based on where you are and where you’ve been (vs. adhering to a specific process or “plan”)
• You reframe the nature of a problem and pivot in the course of a project if necessary
• You let go of a predetermined solution at the outset of a project

Navigating ambiguity - super ability though it is - is still just one of the eight core design abilities. In the past few years, we've made a concerted effort to empower students with flexible ways of thinking that build on process and focus on abilities. We have tools and activities to introduce students to the whole family of abilities on our Introduction to Design Abilities Suite resource page.