Dear Francois,
Thank you for your message.
I agree, everything can be seen as connected to and influenced by everything
else. Designers are pretty good at making connections - particularly
associatively.
Pragmatically, it's useful, however, to sensibly sort things out in terms of
their complicatedness and complexity.
Practically, this categorising things according to their simplicity and
complexity is obvious in human terms.
An example, put a heater in a room and turn it on and we expect the room to
get warmer. It's a simple design situation. If the purpose of our design is
to heat the room we don't in most situations need to know to know about all
the other linkages with everything else in the world.
As another example, we could design a device to turn the heater off when the
room gets warm enough (and turn it on again if it starts getting too cold).
This is a simple one feedback loop situation and most of us can predict the
behaviour of such a device pretty easily.
Some design situations are complicated - think of say the electrical
lighting and power systems in a hospital - but they are not complex.
There are many design situations, however that are much more complex due to
feedback loops and to predict their behaviour cannot be done 'in mind' or by
any groups of minds. The typical solutions is to predict behaviour through
modelling and letting the situation play out so we can see what happens.
As you say, the avoidance of modelling and instead pretending that one can
handle complex situations that are beyond thinking and discussion by
'design thinking' or some other form of thinking or discussion is often done
for a range of reasons such as ROI and demagogy. Where designers undertake
designs in which they are not able to predict the behaviours of outcomes
resulting from their design, this may be also due to other factors including
maximising the profitability of design firms, increasing competitiveness in
bidding, lack of accountability of designers to their customers for
problematic design outcomes, viewing problematic design outcomes as
externalities and other common garden factors such as laziness, ignorance,
over-ambition and weak design education.
There are some obvious solution pathways. The first and most practical in
real world terms is the development of real professionalization of design
activity that includes designers taking full responsibility for predicting
design outcomes accurately and taking financial responsibility for
problematic design outcomes. The second, is radically improved design
education that includes the necessary reasoning and research skills to
enable designers to be able to predict the behaviours over time of outcomes
resulting from their designs.
Best wishes,
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 Francois
Nsenga
Sent: Friday, 13 May 2011 7:45 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: IDEO design thinking
Dear Terry
May I suggest that theren't out there 'simple design situations/problems'.
In our planet earth context, multi-factors interaction is such that things
can't just be 'simple'.
Can we say rather that in some people's mind situations are *simplified*,
first forced, as you say, by limited human brain capacity to grasp the full
breath of complexity, and second, more often, for particular purposes,
including ROI and other demagogical aims?
Regards
Francois
Montreal
P.S. In France and a few other francophone milieux, since three decades
there is an ongoing network (animated among others by Edgar Morin and
Jean-Louis Le Moigne) reflecting on how to 'think'
complexity:www.mcxapc.org/
www.mcxapc.org
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