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Complex Systems Design and New Educational Technology (NATO Advanced Research Workshop)

Design inquiry as an Intellectual Technology for the Design of Educational Systems

 

First published in: Comprehensive Systems Design: A New Educational Technology, Reigeluth, C.M., B.H. Banathy, and J.R. Olson, editors, Spring-Verlag, Berlin. With NATO Scientific Affairs Division (1993).

 

 

The Age of Design

Design is coming into its own as a serious intellectual technology in the service of human intention. We are at a time in the lives of Western societies when the success of reason's own scientific method as the dominant and singular strategy for dealing with all forms of human endeavor has come into question. Research and development are important for attaining and maintaining quality of life but inquiry and innovation are of equal importance.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination™"unstuckness," in other words™are completely outside its domain.

Robert M. Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

It is difficult but not impossible to imagine a new form of inquiry that builds on the successful traditions of rationalism and empiricism yet gets beyond the limitations of these 17th and 18th century designs of inquiry when applied to purposeful human action. Science is unsurpassed as an epistemological and ontological design for describing realities within accepted frames of reference but is ineffective as a sufficient design of inquiry when dealing with teleological issues of human purpose. Teleology however is the heart of creative inquiry and innovative action, the basic elements of design.

That design as a formal process of inquiry could match and even exceed the success of scientized thinking in important intellectual endeavors is possible to take seriously only because of the advent of systems thinking. The systems approach, as reflected in the work of C. West Churchman¹ and others, is expansive, inclusive and synoptic. Systems theory offers a way to describe or imagine complex realities. This perspective provides a world view in which the traditions of the sciences, arts, and humanities can be interrelated and integrated into a form of inquiry which more realistically represents the experienced world.

The systems approach offers a perspective on and an approach to complexity and unity or wholism as descriptive knowledge, knowledge of what is or what was but it does not provide deontic knowledge, knowledge of what ought to be. Design as a form of inquiry is concerned with gaining knowledge of what can and ought to be an instrumental skill in making what ought to be a reality. By bringing together these two very powerful traditions of inquiry a synthesis is achieved between description and prescription. Both traditions of inquiry have been used separately or in conjunction with other traditions such as systems science and industrial design but without the synergy of the conjunction of systems perspective and design action. Both inform and transform the other. Systems theory provides the foundation for complexity in design. The tradition of creativity in design moves systems theory from merely being another form of the positivistic tradition.

For instance systems theories presume there is one whole reality which the inquirer must struggle to see more of in its full complexity. The tradition of creative thought provides another possibility. Like an artist framing a work of art and creating a composition within those limits which then becomes real, it is possible to imagine complex compositions which are created by the designer. These are not part of a larger whole or a member of a taxonomical set but a unique creation whose meaning and value emerge from normative and aesthetic values as much as from a coherency of a universal logic.

In recursive fashion, systems design as a creative process can be used as a form of intellectual technology to design and implement new complex forms of serving systems such as educational systems (including primary, secondary, undergraduate, graduate, vocational and continuing education). Systems design also provides the necessary means to create coherency between form and content in a systemically designed educational system.

For instance, the utilization of a systems design perspective to create a complex integrated design for education assures that the processes and content of the educational system are equally wholistic, creative, systemic and rational. The polarized contemporary issue in higher education concerning the disputed purpose of university education, whether to dispense or create knowledge, misses the opportunity to create a design of education that does both and more including education in integration, praxis, creative and critical thinking and life long learning skills.

In order to effectively use creative design from a systems perspective to create complex whole systems it is necessary to gain a better understanding of the concept of design as a legitimate, disciplined intellectual process. Common understanding treats design at its best as an instrumental skill and at worse a process of decoration. Its potential is becoming recognized however and design is gaining greater recognition. The challenge is to utilize its full potential.

Design as a way of working in the world challenges many long held beliefs about how serious human issues are dealt with, and can appear to be in strange and dangerous company. Ignorance and superstition were suppressed by the sweeping victory of human reason, yet the creative process has aspects that are mysterious, hidden, and beyond the control of direct disciplined inquiry. Design is art and science and more. In the tradition of systems thinking, the synthesis of these components in design result in an emergent quality that transcends the summation of the individual attributes of these other forms of inquiry.

A full creative design process includes three stages: inspiration and commitment, creation or recreation, and innovation. This process of design is not to be confused with the creative processes of the artist's self-expression or the scientist's creative problem solving within a disciplinary field of knowledge. Their creative work is similar in some ways but different in other significant ways, including the existence of the relationship of the designer to a class of people known as the client as discussed by Churchman².

Stages of Design

The first stage, inspiration, deals with life long themes which are played out by individual designers repeatedly in independent design projects as related to in the work of Briggs³ and with the kind of enthusiasm Singer has referred to as the heroic mood⁴ and Campbell has identified as the call in the hero's quest⁵. This energy is essential to the authentic engagement and courage identified by May⁶ creative design requires of designers.

Creative and re-creative processes have been refined through time into formal models that although different have strong resemblance (for examples see fig. 1). These and other models try to describe the process of bringing into existence new forms; whether concrete or abstract. These steps within the creative process have been identified by individuals reflecting on their own creative work which has resulted in artifacts which were not only novel but which embodied attributes which successfully functioned to serve identifiable purposes.

Finally, innovation deals with the issue of leadership, entrepreneurship and facilitation; the processes of giving life to new ideas. This involves the complex social process of introducing change into the lives of individuals who are most often interested in avoiding change and in maintaining stability without novelty. The kind of change brought to existing human activity systems is often dramatic and traumatic. Often the intention of the change agents is not to just rearrange but to transform existing organizational or institutional systems totally in order to better serve a clients purposes. Such activity is full of paradox, opportunity, responsibility and danger.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.

Machiavelli The Prince

These three stages of design are complex and require close study from a systems perspective.

Problem vs. Opportunity

To gain an appreciation of the potential of design as an intellectual technology it is important to challenge some of the predominant assumptions about how to approach intentional change in human systems. Most significant change is justified only as a response to a significant 'problem'. This is a necessity for two reasons. First this is true because change is much more acceptable when framed as getting rid of an undesirable condition or state. The difficulty of imagining and implementing an entirely new creative opportunity for change affecting many individuals is avoided in a problem context. Secondly this is true because traditional scientism is accepted as the primary or only basis of serious inquiry, and the principles embedded in this designed inquiry require a problem context. But if design inquiry, which is inclusive of good science and other ways of knowing, is used it is possible to engage in significant change from a perspective of opportunity and vision rather than of problem.

As Ackoff⁷ has argued, when you try to get rid of a situation you don't like (problem situation) you are not assured that you will wind up with a situation that you do want. However if you move intentionally towards a situation that you do want (vision), you are assured you will move away from what you don't want and towards what you do.

This doesn't mean that the process of framing life situations as problematic is never appropriate. It does mean that it is not necessarily the only or dominant strategy for intentional change and it does mean that a better understanding of the nature of problem characterizations must be reached. The typical models of the steps in problem solving do not account for the complex and interrelated nature of most human situations that attract the attention of change agents. Horst Rittel⁸ has characterized these as 'wicked' problems. Rittel compared problems solving strategies based on a comparison of these 'wicked' problems with the more common 'tame' problem solving strategies.

The salient point remains that problem solving efforts work within situations which we have framed negatively and that problem solving necessarily stays within that frame. To break out of a priori frames and create positive contexts within which to create or recreate systems requires a whole systems design inquiry process.

Creative Systems Design of Design

Design as creative inquiry has application to a variety of systemically related tasks (see fig. 2) internal to any design process. These must all be attended to when creating design processes which are to have utility over time.

The design of the design process using a systems approach can be characterized as a sequence of episodic stages (see fig. 3) which engage designers and design teams in intellectual and experiential activities appropriate to the meter of the project. Each stage builds on a synthesis of the previous stage's work and provides the input for the next stage's work.

Whole Systems Design

Whole systems design consists of 'phases' within the above design 'stages' (see Fig. 4). These stages and phases are not necessarily experienced in distinct, clearly defined sequential activities during any specific design project but there is an episodic movement that does move through successive phases even if repeated. This honoring of the arrow of time is necessary because each phase is dependent in great part on the work done in the previous phase. Each is critical input into the next phase. It is also necessary in the management of complex design projects to mark milestones and tasks which can be coordinated with large numbers of actors who provide the resources and information, or who utilized the output of the different phases in other contexts. The reality of the arrow of time distinguishes the difference between dynamic nonlinear complex systems which best characterize human activity systems, and dynamic linear systems which are not representative of human activity systems.

Design Phases

Each one of these design phases involve tasks and activities specific and appropriate to the intention of that phase which often involves different levels of thinking also, so that abstract thinking must be complimented by techniques and methods which are informed by specialized data bases or expertise. For instance the motivation phase involves reflecting on the life themes, nuances and patterns which will pervade the immanent design work. Inspiration involves the response and connection to the client who holds the ethical, aesthetic, and legal justification and motivation for the design.

Next the preparation phase involves the letting go of old conceptual structures on the part of the designers and design teams similar to the cleansing rituals of traditional vision quests. It includes opening up to the assurance of new learning and dramatic cognitive leaps. It involves the initiation of the collaboration work between clients and designers. Immersion involves the total contextualizing of the designers in the environments and metasystems of the client system. Divergence is the process of seeking complexity by following interests, inspirations, and passions that are not prejudged for utility but valued for perspective and texture. It is the development of experiences, ideas, variables and other design components in great numbers that seem to somehow have bearing on the design project at hand. Convergence involves the deliberate forming of the intellectual crucible within which the creative product is to be forged. It is the deliberate setting of limits and defining of space within which the design process will be contained.

Incubation is the phase of the design process that is the most difficult for active critical thinkers to deal with. It is the process of ceasing the direct confrontation with conscious design tasks and letting unconscious ordering processes form patterns and find resolutions to the complex issues and information which has been generated. It results in a crystallization or cognitive leap in the form of a gestalt, unity or parti that holds the seed or germ for a fully formed system. The design development phase involves detailing and communicating all aspects of the new system in a way that makes it possible to include others outside of the design team who are critical to the implementation phase.

The implementation phase is extremely important in that a design is not a system until it has been translated from concept to reality. This process requires skilled management, collaboration, craft and real world accounting to secure success. The realization of a new system is followed by the utilization phase which involves post utilization evaluation, refinement, adjustment, and other actions which tend to the client's adjustment and adoption of the new artifact. This quick review of the design phases is not meant to imply that they are simple concepts. Each is complex and challenging but within pragmatic reach.

This whole systems design process provides the type of intellectual technology that is capable of the kind of design and redesign needed by educational systems. It is not a problem solving or fixing process, but a creative, transformative process which offers the opportunity to do something new to meet the desires, needs and expectations of the multiple categories of clients who are served by the education systems at all levels of society.

In turn, the potential of this technology requires an educated population of whole systems designers. It requires that an educational system be developed which would prepare designers to take full advantage of the power of creative systems design processes from a systems perspective. The design of the Whole Systems Design graduate program at Antioch University Seattle⁹ is an example. This and other designs of educational systems for whole systems designers can provide templates for the design of future educational systems.

The creation and utilization of educational opportunities for whole systems designers and the application of whole systems design as an intellectual technology require decision makers to accept a change in the traditional approach to educational restructuring. Creative thinking and creative thinkers have been considered dangerous to existing order, which is a paradox. Existing systems that need radical transformation are most often dependent on conservative change agents. These agents are uncomfortable with the nature of the creative process, which to them seems undisciplined and unstructured. The discomfort is not unfounded; it is the ability of the creative designer to break old forms and create new ones that gives designers their value.

One's own free and unfettered volition, one's own caprice, however wild, one's own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness™that is the one best and greatest good, which is never taken into consideration because it will not fit into any classification, and the omission of which always sends all systems and theories to the devil.

Dostoyevsky, F. (1864). Notes from Underground

References

1. Churchman, C. W. (1968). The systems approach. New York: Dell Publishing.
2. Churchman, C. W. (1979). The systems approach and its enemies. New York: Basic Books inc., Publishers.
3. Briggs, J. P. (1990). Fire in the Crucible: The self-Creation of Creativity and Genius, Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, Inc.
4. Singer, E. A. Jr. (1948). In Search of a Way of Life, New York: Columbia University Press.
5. Campbell, J. (1968). The Hero with a Thousand Faces Bollingen Series, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd Ed.
6. May, R. (1975). The Courage to Create New York: Bantam Books.
7. Ackoff, R. (1986). Management in Small Doses New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
8. Rittel, H. (1972). On the Planning Crisis: Systems Analysis of the First and Second Generations Bedriftsokonomen, NR 8, 390-396. Norway.
9. Nelson, H. G. (1990). Critical and Creative Systems Thinking and Systems Education ISSS Conference.