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Design as a social process: a complex systems perspective

The paper was published in a special issue on ‘Design out of Complexity’ co-edited by the author with contributions from participants in the homonymous workshop jointly organised by the Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management Conference (CUPUM 2005) and the AHRC/EPSRC Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD) Research Cluster. The overarching objective was to consider the role of design in shaping the future by bringing together insights from a variety of fields: social science, architecture, planning, design studies, cognitive science and complexity science. The author led the identification of various themes in the workshop and shaped the core idea for the special issue. One of the underlying research themes of the workshop was the impact of social structures and dynamics in the intentional creation or emergence of functional artefacts (from cities to products and from physical objects to services). The paper was a particular response to this theme. The paper demonstrates theoretically how the individual intentional actions at the micro level of a society are linked and co-created by macro social structures and processes. The argument is based on a model which suggests that design is a social activity that can be described as a self-organizing coordination process. The main contribution of the paper is that it provides a framework that explains the micro-macro link in design: the link between design thinking and social structure. The micro-macro link is extensively discussed in sociology, but is really undeveloped in design studies. The work has informed subsequent collaborations with social scientists as well as organizations involved in facilitating and supporting design as a kind of societal action and has fed into the AHRC funded projects ‘The role of Complexity in the Creative Economy’ and ‘Media, Community and Creative Citizenship’ where the author was involved as advisor and co-investigator respectively.