You should find lots of resonance in James March's notion of a technology of foolishness, of playfulness. Herbert Simon's 3rd revised edition of the Sciences as I said had a footnote crediting March for some of his ideas about design that is rather fluid, but part of the idea here consistent in both Simon and March is the notion of rationality's boundaries - an idea that it appears may have been taken from Hayek and von Mises, and I recall reading Simon referencing them - more so Hayek I think. Hayek as you know rejected the idea that a central planner can "design" or "engineer" society and efficiently allocate good and means precisely because his rationality is bounded (as Simon would say), and he (the central planner, not Hayek, also some on the left would think he was!) was terribly ignorant, and his whole notion of the spontaneous emergence of coordination through entrepreneurial responses to uninterrupted price signals has an uncanny parallel to Simon and March's rather non-linear sense of what "design" is, which is the idea that one can design not for a particular consequence, but for good things to emerge on their own. Indeed Hayek's resistence to the "designing" by a central planner is itself an insight into design, that when shaping up society, adopt a general presumption against regulation - let good designs emerge by themselves. Sorry perhaps this confuses more than it helps.
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I do not mean to pose a dichotomy between goal-directed and non-goal-directed. Rather, I think it is a mistake to understand design through the paradigm of goal-directed action, as many have and do. In short, I think that design is better understood as an activity in which the ends are deliberately emergent . As Nelson and Stolterman put it, design results in the "expected unexpected outcome" (2). I think this is also true for activities like exploration, play, improvisation, jazz, and a variety of other creative endeavors. (This is, of course, a simplistic version of our position - I'm just providing it for some context, not advancing it as an argument). -Arjun
National Institute of Education (Singapore) http://www.nie.edu.sg
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