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Embracing complexity in design

This book is part of the vision of the ‘Centre for Complexity and Design’ at the OU aiming to bring together complexity theories and methods with design research and practice. The book was developed through a series of workshops that the authors organised as part of the ‘Embracing Complexity in Design’ project, which was funded by AHRC/EPSRC under the Designing for the 21st Century Initiative. The book provides state-of-the-art developments in the area of complexity and design and synthesizes them into a unique resource for both the design and complex systems community. There is currently no other resource that draws out the important research issues that link the two. The book explores the interface between complexity and design by looking at different domains: cities, architecture, engineering, design, digital art, performance and management. Each chapter covers a different perspective from complexity methods in design to complexity management and design of complex systems. As an editor, Zamenopoulos, took a leading role in organizing the topics and structure of the workshops, assuring the chapter contributions come from recognized experts and cover all the developments in the area. He also took a leading role in organizing the review process. Zamenopoulos is the author of a chapter that focuses on design theory. It offers a logic-analytic treatment that contributes to our understanding of the conditions that can make people and social groups capable to design. In particular, it mathematically proves the necessity of to hold ‘anticipatory representations’ of the relationship between design actions and problem frames and then proves the conditions of their existence. The interdisciplinary investigation of the book and the core ideas presented in the chapter fed into two AHRC funded projects: ‘Scaling Up Co-Design research and practice’ (as PI) and ‘Bridging the Gap between Academic Theory and Community Relevance’ (as Co-I).