"Models of man" in design thinking: The "bounded rationality" episode

Design Issues

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 38-52

  Bousbaci, Rabah ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EDUCATION; FASHION;

EID: 57349175866     PISSN: 07479360     EISSN: 15314790     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/desi.2008.24.4.38     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. Nigel Cross, Kees Dorst, and Norbert N. Roozenburg, Preface to Research in Design Thinking, Nigel Cross, Kees Dorst, and Norbert N Roozenburg, eds. (Delft: Delft University Press, 1992), 1,
2. See also Peter Rowe, Design Thinking (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).
3. I borrow the phrase "generation game" from Nigel Cross, "The Coming of Post-industrial Design," Design Studies 2:1 (1981).
4. See also Geoffrey Broadbent, "The Developments of Design Methods" in Developments in Design Methodology, Nigel Cross, ed. (New York: Wiley, 1984).
5. 1967 is the year in which the Design Methods in Architecture Symposium was held in Portsmouth, UK. For more on this symposium, see Design Methods in Architecture, Geoffrey Broadbent and Anthony Ward, eds. (London: Lund Humphries, 1969).
6. See especially the introduction of Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), whose subtitle is: "The Need for Rationality," For more on the proponents of this first generation, see the proceedings of the 1962 first conference on design methods published in Conference on Design Methods, John Christopher Jones and D.G. Thornley, eds. (New York: Pergamon Press, 1963).
7. Horst Rittel, "Second-Generation Design Methods" in The DMG 5th Anniversary Report: DMG Occasional Paper 1 (1972): 5-10,
8. Also reproduced in Developments in Design Methodology, Nigel Cross, ed. (New York: Wiley, 1984).
9. Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
10. Nigel Cross, "The Coming of Post-industrial Design," Design Studies 2:1 (1981), 4.
11. See the following authors in "Part Three: The Nature of Design Activity" in Developments in Design Methodology, Nigel Cross, ed. (New York: Wiley, 1984): Jane Darke, "The Primary Generator and the Design Process"; Omer Akin, "An Exploration of the Design Process"; and Bryan Lawson, "Cognitive Strategies in Architectural Design."
12. Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action? (New York: Basic Books, 1983);
13. Educating the Reflective Practitioner (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990).
14. For more on this topic, see Rabah Bousbaci and Alain Findeli, "More Acting and Less Making: A Place for Ethics in Architecture's Epistemology," Design Philosophy Papers 4 (2005);
15. www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/home.html (accessed April 29, 2007);
16. Alain Findeli and Rabah Bousbaci, "The Eclipse of the Object in Design Project Theories," The Design Journal 8:2 (2005): 35-49.
17. Herbert, A. Simon, Models of Man: Social and Rational (New York: Willey and Sons, 1957), 241.
18. Some insights about this issue are well developed by Aren Kortguzu, "From Function to Emotion: A Critical Essay on the History of Design Arguments," The Design Journal 6:2 (2003): 49-59.
19. Ulm Design, Herbert Lindinger, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 11.
20. Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (1983).
21. See especially Chapter 3 in Schön (1983),
22. See especially Donald Schön, "Towards a New Epistemology of Practice: A Response to the Crisis of Professional Knowledge" in Learning and Development: A Global Perspective, Alan Thomas and Edward W. Ploman, eds. (Toronto: OISE Press, 1986).
23. Donald Schön, "Designing as Reflective Conversation with the Materials of a Design Situation," Research in Engineering Design 3:3 (1992): 131-148,
24. See Richard Buchanan, "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking" in The Idea of Design, Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan, eds. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 12.
25. For more about these authors and their concepts, see their texts in Cross (1984).
26. Allan Newell and Herbert A. Simon, Human Problem Solving (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972).
27. "Once again we confront the attempt to turn the incalculable into the calculable. But there can be no 'solution' to a state of affairs that never had the structure of a 'problem' in the first place" in Wilson C. St John, Architectural Reflections: Studies in the Philosophy and Practice of Architecture (Oxford: Butterworth, 1992), 45.
28. This section and the next one were adapted (and translated) from Rabah Bousbaci, Les modèles théoriques de l'architecture: de l'exaltation du faire à la réhabilitation de l'agir dans le bâtir (Ph.D. thesis, University of Montreal, 2002), This thesis was directed by Professor Alain Findeli.
29. Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior. A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organizations [New York: The Free Press, MacMillan, 2nd edition, 1957).
30. See particularly chapter 4: "Rationality in Administrative Behavior" and chapter 5: "The Psychology of Administrative Decisions," which represent the heart of this book.
31. For more about the behaviorist school of thought's inability to describe some of the human and animal complex behaviors, see Rowe, Design Thinking, 50, and Newell and Simon, Human Problem Solving For a more historical overview about this issue, see the chapter entitled "Historical Addendum" in Newell and Simon, Human Problem Solving, 873.
32. Rowe, Design Thinking, 44.
33. See Newell and Simon, Human Problem Solving, 875.
34. Ibid., 53.
35. Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior, xxiii.
36. Ibid., xxiv.
37. Herbert A. Simon, Models of Man, Social and Rational(New York: Wiley, 1957), 198.
38. In Administrative Behavior, 80, Simon refers explicitly to Williams James's The Principles of Psychology; to John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct and to some analysis of E. C. Tolman in Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men.
39. Newell and Simon, Human Problem Solving, 72.
40. For more about this model, see Tom Heath's analysis in Method in Architecture (Toronto: Wiley, 1984), 126-127.
41. Rowe, Design Thinking, 51-52.
42. Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 3rd edition, 1996), 108.
43. See Newell and Simon, Human Problem Solving, 59.
44. Simon The Sciences of the Artificial, 111.
45. Ibid., 132.
46. For more, see Newell and Simon, Human Problem Solving, 87;
47. Rowe, Design Thinking, 56;
48. and Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 121 and 128.
49. Rowe, Design Thinking, 56.
50. See footnote 36 in Buchanan, "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking": 14.
51. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963). Hillier, Musgrove, and O'Sullivan also borrow from this philosopher's thinking the idea of design conjecture. See Hillier, Musgrove, and O'Sullivan in Developments in Design Methodology, Nigel Cross, ed.
52. For all the references here, I will use the 1984 edition. See Rittel, Horst, and Webber, "Planning Problems Are Wicked Problems" in Developments in Design Methodology, Nigel Cross, ed. Originally published as part of "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning," Policy Sciences 4 (1973).
53. Buchanan, "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking," 14,
54. Rittel and Webber, "Planning Problems Are Wicked Problems," 137.
55. Ibid., 138.
56. Ibid., 142.
57. Ibid., 139.
58. Ibid., 141.
59. See the statements of the 2nd and 3rd precepts of Descartes's Discourse on Method in section 2.
60. See Bryan R. Lawson, "Cognitive Strategies in Architectural Design" in Developments in Design Methodology, Nigel Cross, ed.
61. Bill Hillier, John Musgrove, and Pat O'Sullivan, "Knowledge and Design" in Developments in Design Methodology, Nigel Cross, ed. Originally published in Environmental Design: Research and Practice, W. J. Mitchell, ed. (Los Angeles: University of California, 1972).
62. For all the references here, I will use the 1984 edition. See Jane Darke, "The Primary Generator and the Design Process" in Developments in Design Methodology, Nigel Cross, ed. Originally published in Design Studies 1:1 (1979).
63. Darke, "The Primary Generator and the Design Process," 180.
64. Ibid., 180.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., 180-181.
67. Ibid., 181.
68. Ibid., 187.
69. Ibid.
70. Carolyn R. Miller, "The Rhetoric of Decision Science, or Herbert A. Simon Says" in The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, Herbert W. Simons, ed, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990),
71. Ibid., 175-176, On the idea of "practical reason," which means "ethics" in Aristotelian philosophy, see Bousbaci and Findeli, "More Acting and Less Making: A Place for Ethics in Architecture's Epistemology."
72. Donald Schön, Educating the Reflective Practitioner, 41.