Embracing Complexity in Design

Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD for short) is a research project funded by EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) under the Designing for the 21st Century initiative. The project is funded for 18 months starting from October 2006 and continues the work of a research cluster with the same name funded in the previous year.

Embracing Complexity in Design is a unique research programme with the objective of understanding the part played by complexity science in design, and increasingly the potential for design to play a major role in the emerging science of complex systems. The previous Designing for the 21st Century cluster established four areas in which design and complexity interact:

• many designed products and systems are inherently complex, e.g. aeroplanes, buildings, cities, microchips, information systems, manufacturers, organisations
• designers need to understand the often complex dynamic processes used to fabricate and manufacture products and systems: design, products and processes co-evolve
• the social and economic context of design is complex, embracing market economics, legal regulation, social trends, mass culture, fashion, and much more
• the process of designing can involve complex social dynamics, with many people processing and exchanging complex heterogeneous information over complex human and communication networks, in the context of many changing constraints.

In this context the new project will address the research questions:

1. How can the methods of complex systems science inform designers, and how can design, as a science of the artificial, inform research into complex systems? How can we create complex adaptive artificial systems? How can complexity help us understand the enabling conditions of creativity and design in human organisations?
2. How are, or how could, the methods of complex system science be used in the production or implementation of designed systems, supply chains, scheduling, etc.?
3. How do designers deal with the socio-economic and legislative context of design, and how might the methods of complex systems science be used to support them?
4. How can the methods of complex systems science be used to investigate the design process as a complex socio-technical system, and how can the methods used by design researchers to study the design process be generalised to inform complex systems research?
5. How do the four areas discussed above interact as a system of systems, and how do designers deal with the great uncertainty and complexity this entails. What are the theoretical and methodological relations between complexity and design? What is the role of design in complex socio-technical systems? How can design, as a science of the artificial, be seen as model for complex systems researchers motivated by applying complexity science in particular domains?