What is it about?
With the challenge of what are now called "wicked problems" and the desire for more user participation in the practice of design, especially design with significant social consequences, the goal-oriented approach taught and practiced in engineering and management schools, as well as elsewhere, has proven inadequate. This paper advocates for a constraint-oriented approach, an approach that focusses on the space of possibilities rather than on a single end point (goal). Such an approach finds ground in cybernetic concepts and arises at the intersection of design theory and systems theory. It also gives rise to new design tools, like constraint reversal.
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Why is it important?
For design to be participative, the desires of those who will be affected by the design need to be included in the process of designing. When desires are formulated as goals, achieving agreement can be problematic. Formulating desires as constraints leaves open a range of possibilities for participants to explore as they seek resolution of conflicts, including the possibility of a change in desires and the creation of new possibilities. This opens the door for the democratization of the practice of design.
Perspectives
Prospects for addressing successfully the human predicament we face by making improvements in our current society and its systems are bleak, at best. While I have no option but to try to make improvements that mitigate human misery where I find it, I am an advocate for creating a new society with new socio-economic-political systems. Such a society implies a new way of thinking about social design and how the transformation from the current to the new could happen. Cybernetics offers concepts that represent a new way of thinking--a way of thinking about ways of thinking.
Laurence D Richards
Indiana University East
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: From Goal-Oriented to Constraint-Oriented Design: The Cybernetic Intersection of Design Theory and Systems Theory, Leonardo, February 2017, The MIT Press,
DOI: 10.1162/leon_a_00862.
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