Principia Designae － Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design

This chapter describes the concept of the Design of Technology. The role of the Design of Technology is to create a bridge between highly advanced science and technology and society through the creation of products. First, this chapter describes the differences that exist between two types of design: (1) design that employs conventional science and technology, and (2) design that employs highly advanced science and technology. Second, it describes the processes in which science and technology and its products become accepted by society. In addition to the conventional methods specialists use to provide simple explanations of physical principles, the chapter highlights three additional views: (1) science and technology’s infiltration of the culture of society, (2) the organization of the social system to cope with negative aspects of science and technology, and (3) the discovery of new mechanisms to recognize unimaginable and invisible dangers. Based on the above discussion and analysis, the chapter discusses methods that can be used to approach the Design of Technology. It suggests that designers and researchers should adopt more open and accepting attitudes and focus on meaning rather than procedure.

Within this paper it is not the aim to explain the mechanisms of creativity, possibilities to measure creativity or to deliver a definition.

Based on some experience based on personal involvement and a large number of case studies some conclusions will be presented. There are also a few critical remarks concerning creativity related practice as well as research.

Creativity is a very complex topic! A differentiation between different kinds of creativity is required as well as an understanding of the dependencies between problem, situation, acting people as a minimum. Based on that a preliminary model may be established, which should serve formulating hypotheses for further empirical research. The outcome of this research may help to improve the model.

Creativity is not just inspiration; it is hard work and should be supported by systematic procedures and methods.

In this article, we use communication as a point of reference to discuss a variant of the sign or mark that design produces. Using the works of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, we focus on the role of communication in design work. Derrida’s analysis is in conflict with ordinary views, in that does not convey an identifiable meaning or ideas between some people. The sign and design in general must be able to function in the absence of the sender, the receiver, and the context of production (i.e., they must not lose their function in different settings), and there is always the possibility of transformation (iterability). This implies the possibility that transformation is always and necessarily inscribed in the functioning or functional structure of the sign and the design, and repeatability as iterability can coexist with originality. On the other hand, the sign and the design also have the capability to communicate, primarily as a means of communication. As a secondary effect, social communication is enhanced, usually based on the conventions used in the design. However, because social communications are inherently limited and iterable, design needs to consider the possibilities of iterability.

To identify the meaning of the advanced design of the twenty-first century, this paper extracts embedded senses—nature, culture, and future—that activate design in society. To identify nature-related social motives that challenge design from a deeply emotional level, sustainability regarding extinct animals is first considered from a perspective that considers the whole environment. Second, the sense of culture is discussed in connection with designed products including abstract paintings. This shows the paradox of the self-organization system between humans and products. Openness is identified as the social motive from a cultural perspective. Third, a socially innovative design perspective is used to point out future subjects. This aspect shows reasons for the expectations of the deep design thinker who leads design discourse into social innovation from an ethical viewpoint, which are social motives for the sense of future. A discussion of these three aspects is used to determine the vital structure of the new meaning of design. Based on the discussion, characteristics of design creativity are presented while the role of academics in advanced design is explored.

A comprehensive notion of design that includes pre-design and post-design is presented in this chapter as hinging on an extended design space. Not just the array of possible solutions, the design space is modeled as comprising two main components. The first is design expertise, which is composed of five tiers: pre-design, task framing, design acts, design proposal, and post-design. The second component is creativity, which is embodied in an insight-impact axis that cuts through the various expertise layers. The model is metaphorically likened to the indestructible Japanese five-tier pagoda, whose strength emanates from flexibility and independence of components, which interact but are also unattached to other components.

The chapter introduces a new approach to social and personal motivation for creativity grounded in the cognitive orientation (CO) theory, and discusses its relation as a major drive to design motive in the pre-design and post-design phases. The instrument for assessment of motivation for creativity—the cognitive orientation questionnaire of creativity (COQ-CR)—is described, and applied in a study about social and personal motivations of creativity of design students in architecture and engineering. The COQ-CR allows characterizing the structural and thematic composition of motivation for creativity across different design disciplines. Implications for design practice and design education include operationalizing the COQ-CR for understanding the underlying connections between motivation for creativity and design motives of designers belonging to different disciplines.

Thinking quickly overwhelms the mind, and the mind expands into the world. The mind creates a range of cognitive tools to represent thought. Sketches are among the most prevalent and productive ways to make thought visible to self and others and to promote creative thought. Sketches, like diagrams, map the elements and relations of ideas to elements and relations on the page. They entail abstraction and allow ambiguity. Their ambiguity creates possibilities, it allows exploration, inference, and discovery of ideas, some of the reasons they are so useful in design as well as other domains. Objects and the surroundings that provide contexts for objects can also serve as tools for thought. Like sketches, objects and surroundings provide visual feedback, but unlike sketches, objects and environments provide tangible feedback, feedback from interactions with the body as well as the eyes of the user. Whereas design begins with ideas and goals that need embodiment, redesign begins with a specific problem embodied in a person in a place at a time. Solutions often come from reuses of old objects. Problems and reuses of designed products inspire implicit conversations between designers and redesigners.

Data-driven design procedures on materials, artifacts (engineering products) and environmental projects are comparatively studied in accordance with view of three loops for learning, namely, learning how to learn, changing the rules and following the established rules. Materials design procedures including the three loops by data-intensive ways are under development by taking advantage of a qualified database on materials so as to establish an exemplar for data-driven design in general with an explicit articulation. Design procedures of nuclear reactors have changed from data-driven design in the beginning to experience-based design of tacit knowledge, and standard-based design reflecting number of committed experts for design and development. This explanation of the nuclear reactor design is extended to show difficult issues about design procedures for environments which have not only one directional time dependent evolutional features as natural phenomena but also are full of human dimensions of about seven billion people with consequent uncertainties. As concluding remarks, an articulation to converge into productive cycles for the latter two design problems is given, extending procedures for data-driven materials design by introducing human dimensions for nuclear reactors and adding irreversible path dependent features and human dimensions for environmental issues.

The motive of design should be expanded beyond its current focus on the design process, and should include understanding and possibly improvement of pre- and post-design activities. This chapter undertakes a preliminary enquiry into the broad processes that might constitute design, pre-design and post-design phases, and proposes the ‘design-society’ cycle as a framework for further enquiry into these processes, to understand their influence on: developing knowledge and experience triggered in the societal mind by a product, subsequent transformation of this knowledge and experience to form new product requirements, and further transformation of this knowledge and requirements to form new products. Experience of individuals and valuation of experience are seen as keys to the development of this knowledge, with the background of the individual, in particular her myriad identities, as a major influence in forming this experience. Using ‘the story of longitude’ as a case study, the chapter deconstructs the design-society cycle to propose a number of key questions that could form an agenda for further enquiry into the Cycle.

The characteristic feature of the end of the twentieth century is a modernized, systematized society for the development of technology. By preserving the character of instrumentality, technological cohesion or conjuncture is our new circumstance. New phenomena have arisen such as technological abstraction, a separation of function from form, and cards with many functions. Until the twentieth century, technologists looked for new technology as a positive way to create artifacts. But in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to think about negative technology (technica negativa). Negative technology is no longer a theoretical idea but a practical project. After Fukushima, we must concern ourselves about safety and close the nuclear facilities. Such a project must be a negation of positive technology, but this negativity should be turned to be positive.

This chapter presents a system to model social interactions between producers and consumers in the post-design phase. Producers form their expectations about consumer behavior during the pre-design and design phases. Consumers’ behaviors are a result of their interactions with designs based on their experiences that form their value systems as well as their social interactions with other consumers. Because the post-design phase includes consumer behavior, producers reevaluate their plans and strategies for future designs. A subset of the system is implemented to model social interactions where the producers and consumers are modeled as computational agents. The agents’ values that are used to guide their decision-making are modified through the agents’ interactions with products and other agents. One of the goals of this work is to demonstrate the viability of agent-based modeling to study innovation ecosystems and their social aspects. Through computational experiments, we are able to test hypotheses regarding the mutual influence of producer and consumer values on the trajectory of design improvements. Exemplary results are presented.

The paper proposes an extension of the Gero’s Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS) framework aimed at representing Need and Requirements and their relationships with the Function, the Behaviour and the Structure of an artefact. Needs and Requirements can be modelled as further types of variables to describe with the same formal approach of the situated FBS model the transformation processes which occur in the earlier stages of design, when the requirements still need to be specified. Furthermore the external world where needs are situated is split into the complementary perspectives of the different stakeholders influencing the adoption process of a new product, i.e. into buyers, users, beneficiaries and other outsiders. The extended model aims at supporting a more careful and detailed investigation of the processes that occur in the earliest stages of design, and specifically what happens in new product development activities. As carefully discussed in the introduction of the paper, such a shift in the designer’s perspective appears as a crucial step to build an efficient design methodology for innovation.

Risk management today has its main roots in decision theory paradigm (Friedman and Savage, J Polit Econ 56:279–304, 1948). It consists in making the optimal choice between given possible decisions and probable states of nature. In this paper we extend this model to include a design capacity to deal with risk situations.

A design perspective leads to add a new action possibility in the model: to design a new alternative to deal with the probable states of nature. The new alternative design might also “create” new risks, so that a design perspective leads also to model the emergence of new risks as an exogenous “design process”. Hence a design perspective raises two issues: can we design an alternative that would lower the risk? Does this new alternative create new risks?

We show (1) that minimizing known risks consists in designing an alternative whose success is independent from all the known risks—this alternative can be considered as a generic technology. We show (2) that the design of this generic technology depends on the structure of the unknown, ie the structure of the space generated by the concept of risk-free alternative. (3) We identify new strategies to deal with risks as dealing with the unknown.

In this paper we propose and introduce parametric design as a potential methodological basis for a shared computational representation schema that can support crowdsourcing design in a ‘social motive’ model of design. A ‘social motive’ model of design is multi-phase (Pre-design, Design, and Post-design) model of design that offers a new perception for obtaining and exploiting experiential feedback of society. We first introduce the theory and concepts of Crowdsourcing. In the following sections we propose a theoretical schema that demonstrates how information flow is shared in a holistic and compound model in various phases of design. Our digital design model and the conceptual structure represents computational design processes of informed design model; informing design about per-formative and physical environmental conditions as well as the experience and wisdom of the crowd which can be easily mapped to the pre-design; conceptual design; and post-design. Finally we illustrate, demonstrate and discuss how by exploiting the concept of the parametric schema as a common representational formalism, the wisdom of the crowd can potentially be integrated to inform processes of digital design generation, adaptation and change in the various phases of design in order to improve design.