Seeing the World Through Process Eyes
Dissertation project by Johanna Mehl
Johanna Mehl successfully defended her dissertation, Seeing the World Through Process Eyes: A History of Designers as Problem-Solvers, in 2026, graduating summa cum laude.
The dissertation traces how, around 1970 at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, a collision of countercultural politics and cybernetics produced one of design's most durable self-images: the designer as universal problem-solver. Drawing on interviews and archival research, it examines a pivotal moment in which design's center of gravity shifted away from the production of objects and buildings and toward something previously invisible or merely assumed — process itself. Problem-solving, long an implicit part of design work, was abstracted into a transferable method claimed to apply to any problem, in any domain — a shift the dissertation calls the process turn in design.
Situating this turn within a broader postwar move across the sciences, humanities, and arts toward operational, systems-based understandings of the world, the dissertation argues that design's expanding claim to universal expertise was not spontaneous but the product of deliberate institutional and discursive labor. It traces this labor through four figures grounded in real historical actors at Berkeley each representing a distinct professional imaginary of what design could be and do. Where the first three figures naturalized an image of the bounded but socially ambitious problem-solver, the fourth recovers a feminist counter-tradition that understood design not as convergent problem-solving but as the collective work of gathering, holding, and carrying complexity forward.
By historicizing the assumption that designers are universal problem-solvers, the dissertation opens space for the accountability and critical reflection that assumption has long foreclosed — offering a new genealogy for ongoing debates about design's social ambitions and its complicity in the structures it claims to change.