Harnessing complexity in design (original) (raw)
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Futures, 2008
Design out of complexity This collection of papers is product of a one-day workshop entitled 'Design out of complexity' that was held at University College London in the summer of 2005. The general purpose of the workshop was to investigate associations and contradictions between complexity and design, in terms of concepts, theories, or methodologies, and propose a future research agenda on their relation. Let us first introduce the premises behind the meeting.
Embracing design in complexity
While designers willingly embrace the science of complex systems, most scientists rarely give design a second thought and thereby miss one of the most revolutionary aspects of the new science: design, in the context of policy, is an essential part of the experimental method of the new science of complex systems. Currently few scientists today know anything about design as a process for understanding, creating and managing complex systems; but by the end of this century, if not by the end of this decade, design will be required study for complex systems science, alongside mathematics, statistics, computation and other core topics. Many of the systems that we find hard to understand are socio-technical-systems systems of systems-with tightly coupled physical and social subsystems. Most of these systems are artificial, meaning that they are in part or whole man-made-they are designed (Simon 1969).
Confronting Complexity: An Introduction By Way of Design Computation
Studio briefs, influenced by an expansive view of architectural practice are increasingly foregrounding the architectural problem as inter-related, dynamic, and complex. Such a position is often focused on exposing patterns and processes as key drivers in a project. Sometimes this affects design projects in directly formal ways, and other times, these forces manifest in operational strategies. The discourse and studio projects surrounding Landscape Urbanism, which advocates a design practice wherein the project is seen to both affect and be affected by an inclusive set of environmental, social and economic factors, is an example of this. Through the lens of such a systems-based approach, the site is foregrounded as being dynamic, interconnected, resilient and indeterminate, and strategies for design within this flux are sought out. How can we directly confront some of these qualities around complexity in early design? How can we foster the development of new methodologies and introduce new tools to beginning designers to incrementally build the capacity to confront complexity in design projects? One approach, discussed here, involves coupling the learning around the systems-based design approach suggested above with another highly in-demand curricular component – that of design computation. Like its parent discipline of computation and other trans-disciplinary appropriations (such as computational ecology, computational economics etc.), design computation inherently presents strategies for managing complexity. However, within the academy, design computation is often presented, by way of workshops or elective courses, as a platform-specific skill highlighting the use of a computational tool (such as Grasshopper) to solve a suite of predetermined exercises. Recognizing that the field of design computation is changing and new applications for it are constantly emerging, it is opportune to explore ways to foreground the teaching of design computation not only as a specific tool or platform but as a methodology by which to approach design problem complexity in general. System Stalker Lab, a third year undergraduate studio, introduces students to issues of complexity by way of an exploration of design computation. The studio incorporates key concepts from the discipline of Computer Science and draw parallels between it and design practice by unpacking cross-disciplinary notions of algorithmic thinking, representation, programming, and design. The studio sees the students engage with computation, enabling them to develop project-specific tools to structure their work as a dynamic system, and then explore the space of that system and develop it in an iterative manner to arrive at the final proposition. The studio exercises described here are designed to deliver the technical skills-based instruction required of design computation while, simultaneously, developing the students’ ability to confront, manage and respond to the complexity within a design problem.
Understanding the complexity of design
2006
The powerful concept of complexity can be applied to help us understand not only modern engineering systems, but also the design of those systems, and artifacts in general. In this chapter we attempt to establish a two-pronged theoretical framework for understanding the complexity of design. By design we mean the activity of designing artifacts in general, not any specific class of artifact.
Futures, 2008
This paper is an attempt to discuss the concepts of complexity and complex social system and their relation with the concepts of design and design activity. It is argued that a design cannot appear as an emergent property out of such systems, since it presupposes intentionality. However, to a certain extent, complex (social) systems need to be governed by means of design. Even if design requires prediction, which in our opinion is impossible in strict sense in case of social systems, there are two important conditions for a “good design”, namely, to look at the past, and to look at the future. After this general discussion, the paper provides a few suggestions on how to do the former without prejudices, and presents an effective technique for doing the latter without illusions.
Designing in the real world is complex anyway - so what?
2005
Designing is a heterogeneous, fuzzily defined, floating field of various activities and chunks of ideas and knowledge. Available theories about the foundations of designing as presented in "the basic PARADOX" (Jonas and Meyer-Veden 2004) have evoked the impression of Babylonian confusion. We located the reasons for this "mess" in the "non-fit", which is the problematic relation of theories and subject field. There seems to be a comparable interface problem in theory-building as in designing itself. "Complexity" sounds promising, but turns out to be a problematic and not really helpful concept. I will argue for a more precise application of systemic and evolutionary concepts instead, which - in my view - are able to model the underlying generative structures and processes that produce the visible phenomenon of complexity. It does not make sense to introduce a new fashionable meta-concept and to hope for a panacea before having clarified the mor...