Werner Kunz and Horst W. J. Rittel (1970), Issues as Elements of Information Systems, Working Paper No. 131, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California, Berkeley — https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5cj786v8
Key takeaways
From the reading, NOTE-811.
- Issues are the atoms. An issue has the form of a question, arises from a controversial statement, is specific to a situation, and is “raised, argued, settled, ‘dodged’, or substituted”.
- Objections are new issues. I₂ is a direct successor of I₁ when it “challenges a statement made in support of one of the positions maintained in view of I₁”. Other relations: generalisation, relevant analogy, and compatibility of positions across issues.
- Four kinds of issue. Factual, deontic, explanatory, instrumental. Questions of fact are kept apart until someone doubts an answer.
- Why not a thesaurus. The discourse runs on “ad hoc vocabulary which is rapidly changing, defying thesaurization”, whose central terms are “proper names for long stories” that depend on context.
- Numbered items. “All the items are numbered consecutively to ease reference”, with relations kept as matrices and drawn as issue maps.
- Subsystems. An issue bank of living, settled or abandoned, and latent issues; an evidence bank; a handbook of model problems; a topic list; an issue map; a documentation system.
- Field report. Three manual systems in government use, with “eager acceptance by the users although the implementation induced major changes in organization and working styles”. Nothing about cost.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-06 at the owner’s request, with the rest of the design-rationale batch under ADR-030, and read on 2026-10-14 in NOTE-811. It is the origin of the scheme ADR-032 began from, and the reading shows where the record departs from it: IBIS files an objection as a new issue, the record as a claim. Its numbering of every item against a drifting vocabulary is a 1970 precedent for CLAIM-180 and CLAIM-182. Its operating cycle implies staff who edit issues for the participants, which bears on CLAIM-179’s argument about who files. No THEORY was filed: the paper’s general claims are asserted, not supported.