Towards a general theory of design

Enrico Viceconte, 2020

I wrote here several posts in which I analyzed the essence of design processes, sometimes with imprudence, looking, for common characteristics between, for example, the design of an airplane and that of a book, that of a market (more or less digital) and that of a cultural project in a city.

In the latter case, and using the example of a project of the City of Bologna, I have shown how there is a conceptual hierarchy (top-down, but also bottom-up) that connects the general idea, aimed at moving interest and flows of people and projects on an urban area, to ideas and projects in greater detail, such as a single exhibition of a network of exhibitions and events, and, even more in detail, of a single installation, a museum room, an exhibition support, a multimedia product.

Obviously this hierarchy and the "network of designers" also exists in the design of a complex artifact such as an airplane, which starts from the entire aircraft, descending towards the subsystems and components: it is the function of Systems Engineering, which extends to the Product Lifecycle Management, to the design of production and logistics processes (with the related supply chains and their management and business models).

In examining the various design processes, we also focused on two directions of development of a concept and, consequently, of everything else. We defined them as

1) inside-out, and

2) outside-in.

In the first direction, the design moves from the push of an intuition, born within a small team (or in the head of an "author"), towards the market, in the second direction, the design is "pulled" by a more or less explicit demand from stakeholders in general and from the market (customers) in particular.

The top-down / bottom-up and inside-out / outside-in moves are not mutually exclusive but are often part of an iteration of those design thinking modes throughout the development cycle. The "lean" or "agile" logic, in common between the Systems Engineering methodologies (more suitable for high-tech products and services) and those of Design Thinking (more suitable for high-touch products and services), provides for early validations at a general (higher) concept level of what you intend to produce and then subsequent validations, iterated as the project descends into the various details(lower levels) that must be integrated with each other at the higher level. In a hierarchy of products (Product Breakdown) and functions (Function Breakdown).

A "spiral" process that would risk being too complicated without the rationality of the engineering based standardization, of the reduction of variety, of the reuse of ready-for-use and ready-for-integration design results, taken "off the shelf".

The logic of concurrency of marketing, design, production, service and use activities suggests that consideration of the division of work should be added to the two decompositions (Functional Breakdown and Product Breakdown): the actors (Organizational Breakdown) and the costs incurred to achieve the result (Cost Breakdown). This would create a systemically designed business model.

We tend to take into consideration, as well as a "Total Cost of Transactions, Production and Service", which also extends to negative externalities, for example the environmental costs of production, a Total Cost of Ownwership, which includes the costs and sacrifices that have the customer to get value from use.

The emerging perspective, supported by a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) approach of each supplier and SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) approach of each customer, with a probabilistic consideration of risks, is that of a Total Cost of Partnership and that of a Total Value of Partnership.

With “Partnership” I mean the vertical and horizontal integrations in the different projects, in a spectrum that goes from the weak, transitory rlationship (with a unregulated bargaining power partnership) (market) to the strong, lasting, collaborative and “redistributive” partnership (collaboration).

The design models improperly called of "co-creation" of value, seen as models of generative and productive partnership between different actors, in the phases of marketing, design, production, service and use, are changing the way in which the design process can be understood.

All this Cartesian decomposition and hierarchical recomposition (breakdowns) of problems leads us to think that even the concept of value, in the design processes, is increasingly better specified and redistributed, allocating it to different levels of breakdown.

Speaking of Design Thinking or Systems Engineering means having already adopted a design paradigm that takes into account the Total Cost of Partnership and the Total Value of Partnership both as the final result of a project and in the redistribution of costs and value, sacrifices and benefits among all the actors of a partnership.

Last, but not least, is the concept of "designing the artificial" as "design of interface systems". Where technology "stands in the middle" between nature and humans, between humans and humans, between humans and technology, between technology and technology. “Technology” and “artificial” have in common being the results of human design. Considering technology as an interface allows us to better analyze the area of interaction between the parts of a system as an area of collaboration and partnership. For example, a machine control and supervision interface must be thought of in terms of physical and cognitive ergonomics, but also in terms of the machine's need for a human contribution to its performance. A theme that, in the becoming of the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence, becomes very interesting.