Understanding the Complexity of Design

The powerful concept of complexity can be applied to help us understand not only modern engineering systems, but also the design of those systems, and artifacts in general. In this chapter we attempt to establish a two-pronged theoretical framework for understanding the complexity of design. By design we mean the activity of designing artifacts in general, not any specific class of artifact. The first route to understanding the complexity of design is based on a fundamental exploration of what it means for a system to be complex. This avenue is essentially mathematical in character, and for it we rely heavily on the works of Robert Rosen, Nicholas Rashevsky, and Peter Wegner. Having discussed briefly the foundations of this approach, it is then applied to the science of design. In particular, the goal is to show that design in general is a member of the class of systems that are formally described as open and complex, and not a member of the class of systems that are formally described as closed and algorithmic. This amounts to theoretical validation for adopting a paradigm for using an open relational concept, such as affordance, as a basis for design, rather than a closed algorithmic concept such as function. This approach also suggests abstract affordance based descriptive models of design as alternatives to the current function based models of design. The second route to understanding the complexity of design lies in the study of systems that are in some obvious way complex. This approach is essentially empirical in character. Accordingly, the goal here is to show that design exhibits similar characteristics to other complex systems, in particular, as will be shown, a class of complex systems known as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). This constitutes more