Hi Klaus and GK and Mike,
In this, I feel its easy to confuse things best related to the object of
study with things that relate to the person interacting with them and with
things that relate to processes and theories. GK usefully just drew
attention to part of this in regard to process (activities).
Personally, as a socio-tech system designer designing across human and
technical issues, I find great similarity between designing in both realms.
This is particualrly obvious when designing across relams.
The similarity comes from being human. I design by using my thoughts,
emotions, feelings, speculations, information, biases, culurally imposed
habits and limitations, affection and critical facultiesy etc as a human
animal. These abilities apply to any situaiton I am in.
Some issues are well-structured and some ill-structured. Even the most
humanistic design issues involving visions of the future can be well
structured. For example, I'm just about to be involved with a small
collaborative team in multistakeholder design and research work using
futures visioning processes on reducing incidents of anti-social behaviour
on a new railway line. Many of the issues are well structured, including
the political tensions between some stakeholder groups.
Structuredness is useful and a property of the focus of interest as seen by
the designers. It is always possible to view some issues differently by
pretending that they are different and making them appear strange. In which
case, the structure is viewed differently. The intrinsic real world
structures of relationships of the focal issue don't however change - just
the ways they are conceived (echoes of 'does the sun go round the earth?').
A different but related issue is whether the situation in focus has a
particualr group of very useful additional characteristics that include:
being internally consistent, deterministic, 'self referential', isomorphic
and whether they behave in an associatively and distributively coherent
manner. If so then whoopee!, these are characterisitics that enable the easy
use of mathematics in predictively modelling the behaviour of a situation
and designed interventions in it. They are the strong suite of engineering
design and enable engineering designers more safely to predict the outcomes
of their creativity. Sometimes, some of these characterisitcs apply to human
social interactions also. This is to be expected because humans have
strongly habituated behaviours - such as anger in response to critique. The
logic of everyday stakeholders is also often very predictable (e.g. ask
football enthusiasts who read newspapers about their views of last weeks
match).This enables the application of mathematical applications to many
human design situations involving visions and stakeholders.
The terms, 'ill-defined' and 'well-defined' are often conflated in the
design literature with 'ill-structured' and 'well-structured'. They come
together in trelation to the above point. If a problem situation is
well-defined and well structured and determinisitic then mathematic
approaches are likely to be applied easily and very usefully. Klaus suggests
that the primary focus should be on visions and stakeholdersMy experience is
that the primary benefit of involving participants in collaborative design
situations is that it increases the variation of experience and thinking
brought to bear. This doesn't go against the idea that human behaviours are
often habitual and robotlike and hence well suited to application of
rational procedures of analysis - just that the target is different.
Klaus, I suspect because of the language issues and the baggage that some
language has, you are conflating some of these issues and oversimplifying
the situation. I'm also a bit concerned that you seem to be suggesting that
designers (as god) should envision the futures, and then twist stakeholders
arms till they are enroled into realizing the designers vision. Is that what
you meant?
Thoughts?
Warm regards,
Terry
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Klaus
Krippendorff
Sent: Tuesday, 22 April 2008 5:14 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: well-structured and ill-structured activity in designing
terry, mike and others,
we discussed the difference between ill-structured problems in mathematics
and rittel's wicked problems before.
the difference is that the former is defined in terms of the difficulty of
finding a rational procedures, the latter involves the everyday logic and
politics of human stakeholders. although rittel was a mathematician and had
a natural inclination towards this language, he came to the wickedness of
problems by experiencing problems in city planning and architecture, which
involve a lot of stakeholders, not a single rational mind/decision maker.
personally, i find the whole paradigm of problem solving, which stems from
rational conceptions such as simons', quite limited. i prefer designers to
talk about visions of possible futures and to find compelling arguments for
enrolling stakeholders to realize that vision (see the semantic turn).
klaus
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