Designs and designing

Abstract

Introduction Designing is, obviously, a key activity in design-oriented problem solving. In the business and organizational field designing means social system design: you design actions or new roles, relations and processes to be executed by people who operate in organizations in systems of existing roles, relations and processes. We all have a certain understanding of engineering design. However, intuitively we feel that social system design is different. This is true, there are significant differences. At the same time there are also significant similarities. Because at present engineering design is more developed than social system design, these similarities mean that we can learn a lot from engineering design for social system design. Therefore we will give, in Sections 12.2–12.5, some general design theory for designing material artefacts. By ‘general design theory’ we mean design theory, independent of the particular artefact being designed (for further details, see van Aken, 2005b). In Section 12.6 we discuss social system design using the general design theory of the previous sections, but also showing the significant differences between material and social system design. These derive largely from the way the design is realized, but these fundamental differences also reflect on the nature of the design to be made, the way it is to be made and the ways in which the design is represented. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the paradigmatic starting points involved in social system design. These paradigmatic starting points concern conceptions on the nature of (material or social) reality, the nature of knowledge we can get on this reality and the methods we can use to acquire this knowledge (Guba and Lincoln, 2000). Designing Material Artefacts: Designs and Designing The Design The first question, then, is: what is a design? A design can be defined as a model of an entity-to-be-realized, as an instruction for the next step in the creation process. This entity can be an object or a process. The model can take various forms, such as a drawing or a set of drawings, but can also have various other forms, such as a text, a flow chart, a scale model, a computer 3D representation and so on.