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research:informal_systems
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Informal Systems
Some of my research involves developing methods and tools on informal rather than formal foundations.
While formal systems allow us to build a solid, rigorous, rational foundation for design, there are some problems:
- Formal systems development is a long term undertaking. It may be decades before real headway achieves practical improvements.
- Formal systems can be hard to understand. We're not used to thinking logically all the time. We often use intuition and judgement in place of logic. This means formal systems can seem extremely unintuitive - and therefore relatively useless - to the untrained. And yet, we must continue to engineer things.
- Formal systems are not tools and methods that can be used by practising designers. We need tools and methods now, not later, after formal systems for design have been established.
So, in addition to formal systems, it makes sense to develop in parallel various informal methods and tools that can improve a designer's lot in the near term.
Current topics in informal systems of interest to me include:
- Notes on the FBS framework.
- How does modular design fit into my overall design process?
- IDEA is a system for conducting concept design.
- Pattern languages in design engineering, and their application to best practices.
- Design schematics for information visualization in the early stages of design and product development.
- Tcl map is a small concept mapping tool written in Tcl/Tk to test drive ideas for design schematics.
- Interval-based methods applied to concept generation and evaluation.
- Achieving balance is, I think, a better perspective on design than is problem solving.
- Effectiveness versus efficiency as fundamental drivers of design.
- Boundaries of designing is a project to see where the act of designing becomes something else; it's an approach to defining designing by first defining what it's not.
- Products as transformers, an approach to structuring design processes based on treating products as transformers of their inputs to outputs.
- Function modelling, to better understand the transition between reasoning about function and behaviour, and reasoning about form & shape.
- Systems thinking on design, analysis, and validation.
- Product lifecycle management deals with the interface between IT, management, and engineering.
- Analogical reasoning is, I think, foundational to “creativity” and innovation in design.
- Reflection: the capacity of a person to think about self and the self's actions in a broader context.
- Problem analysis: a generalization of design briefs and requirements engineering, problem analysis involves identifying a problem and framing it in a way to which all agents agree.
- Design thesaurus is a project intended to try to capture similar ideas about design in an informal way.
- Quasi-natural language is an idea to develop a kind of structured english for design.
See Also
References
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research/informal_systems.txt · Last modified: 2020.03.12 13:30 (external edit)
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