Hi Klaus,

Thank you for your comments.

You wrote: <snip>'Innovations cannot be extrapolated from existing data,
they always add something new and are inherently unpredictable from the
past. <endsnip> '

Please can you say more. Reality seems to be the opposite. 

One of the things I find  obvious is the path dependence of innovations by
which they are tightly linked to and dependent on past innovations. Mostly
future innovations are fairly easy to see at least in broad brush format
for a decade or more  ahead. For  example as soon as it was obvious in the
70s that logic chips and  small electromechanical actuators would be mass
produced, you could (and lots of us did) immediately predict most of the
consumer items that we have seen developed since then. Similarly, you can
see now that the rapid rise in battery powered devices (particularly phones
and electric cars) will result in particular kinds of 'innovations' in the
governance of Bolivia over the next decade or two. This doesn't take much.
There are only a few places lithium is available in easy to access
quantities. Bolivia holds 50% of the worlds reserves and is not militarily
one of the stronger nations. You might also predict some innovations in
governance and trade in Afghanistan now lithium has been discovered there.
Similarly, it is possible to predict some innovations in future US-Iranian
negotiations due to the fact that  Hezbollah and the IRGC are well
represented in South America near Bolivia.

Linking  definitions of design to  'newness' and to social interactions as
theory foundations doesn't seem to  work on several fronts.  In the 90s, I
also defined design in terms of newness and social creation. It seemed
obviously useful, however, to test definitions of design -  there are
hundreds of them. Some of the tests I used included: 1) Did the definitions
successfully include everything that people seemed to think should be
included in  design?; 2) Did they  exclude things that didn't seem to be
design? 3) Did they work to make a coherent theory picture across all the
disciplines that have strong literatures of design and design theory?; 4)
Did they make sense in terms of providing good coherence for design with
theories from other fields ?; and 5) Did they fit with observable reality?
Defining design activity as dependent on newness and social construction and
independent of the past seemed to fail several of the above. 

A key issue in theorising about design at a macro-scale seems to be how to
deal with 2 issues: path dependence and delay between innovation and
appearance on the market. For example, ideas about devices similar to the
iPad were around in the 80s. In the mid-90s (15 years ago), I wrote my PhD
thesis on an A4 size lightweight touch sensitive Compaq computer screen
using 'Pen Windows 1.0'.  It worked well (especially compared to the Newton)
and recognised my handwriting (even I have difficulty with that!). It was
easy to see then that sometime in the future Apple would eventually come up
with the iPad or something similar  - and that it would likely be more user
friendly because  that appears to be a focus of Apple's design effort. It's
just taken rather a long time!

Can you suggest areas of design that could not be extrapolated from prior
art?

Best wishes,
Terry