Design problems are wicked in nature. Wicked problems are difficult to understand, formulate and solve. The literature focuses mainly on the characteristics of wicked problems, very little is available to how wicked problems (synonymous to ill-structured) should be formulated to make them well structured. Assessment of wickedness can help designers formulate problems into well-structured. This work proposes a metric for (lack of) structuredness as a measure for the degree to which a design problem is ill-structured. A Delphi-based method as benchmark for validating the metric is also proposed.
