COMPLEXITY - DESIGN'S PROPER SUBJECT - SYSTEMIC AND EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS MODELS IN DESIGN

Designing is a heterogeneous, fuzzily defined, floating field of various activities and chunks of ideas and knowledge, aiming at transferring existing situations into preferred ones. Attempts at designing foundations of designing have evoked the impression of Babylonian confusion. The reasons for this "mess" may lie in the "non-fit" of theories and subject field. There seems to be a comparable interface problem in theory-building as in designing itself.

Is complexity in design the same as complexity in complexity theory? Complexity (theory) sounds promising, but turns out to be a problematic and not really helpful concept. One may argue that complexity is the result of the failure of the Newtonian Paradigm (which represents the world as simple mechanisms) to be generic and conclude that simple systems and complex systems are disjoint categories that encompass all of nature. Complexity thus may be defined as the property of a real world system that is manifest in the inability of any one formalism being adequate to capture all its properties.

The systems concept in design as used in the ubiquitous "complex systems" appears to be rather simplistic. There is hardly any reference to the elaborate thermodynamic and biological theories of open / dissipative / closed systems, which explain how systems are able to keep a state of high order far from equilibrium. Systems concepts in design are mainly based on simplified applications of Wiener's cybernetics (1948), dealing with feedback, communication and control in goal-oriented processes. He explicitly warned of any hope that this approach could contribute to the healing of the diseases of society.

It was Weaver's concept of "organized complexity" (1948), which filled the gap between the Newtonian concepts of "problems of simplicity" and "problems of disorganized complexity" and might have provided a powerful basis for dealing with complex social problems / design problems. This was his enthusiastic appeal for the next 50 years; but his programmatic approach was neglected in favour of computability and formal homogeneity (as in OR and later in the Design Methods Movement).

Circularity, self-referentiality, and the concept of autopoietic closure in living and meaning-based systems establish the basic pragmatic learning cycle of acting and reflecting. This naturalistic conception of evolutionary epistemology is essential for my further argument concerning design processes. More appropriate systems theories, as for example Luhmann´s theory of social systems (extending the biological concept of autopoiesis to psychic and social systems), and a generalized model of socio-cultural evolution, allow to specify more clearly the "knowledge gaps" inherent in the design process.

There are two basic problems related to systemic gaps:
(1) The gaps between autopoietic systems involved in designing. This is fundamental systemic "obstinacy", which is labelled or covered with the nice and common, but fuzzy terms "creativity", "subjectivity", "values", "trends", …
(2) The gaps between the evolutionary mechanisms involved in designing. Or: the future orientation of design activities. The artefact, once released, remains as it is. The environments of the artefact change in manners, which are in principle unpredictable.

"Complexity" is just another word for these phenomena.

These aspects have to be taken into account as constitutive of any attempt at theory-building in design, which can be characterized as a (nevertheless often successful) "practice of not-knowing".

I conclude, that comprehensive "unified" theories, or methods, or process models run aground on the identified knowledge gaps, which allow neither reliable models of the present, nor reliable projections into the future. Consolation may be found in performing a shift from the effort of adaptation towards strategies of exaptation, which means the development of stocks of alternatives for coping with unpredictable situations in the future. And design theory has to provide the conceptual meta-framework for this.