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An Emergence-based Approach to Designing

This fully refereed paper presents a consolidation of the author’s research into bottom up methods for designing based on ‘emergence’ that integrate ‘systems approach’ into design thinking, extending the boundaries of current design practice. It embraces novel design methods which draw inspiration from nature, using a dual approach- theoretical and experimental, to explain the shortcomings of the traditional top-down approach, and to demonstrate the advantages of the bottom-up emergence-based approach to designing.

The paper explores limitations to the traditional top-down approach to designing as leading to systems only partially designed and prone to failure, which leaves a large number of viable design configurations unexplored. It demonstrates that even simple systems have considerably large design space (a number of discrete states in which the system can be) and that the top-down serial search of that space does not lead to the most efficient outcome. Using the author’s own computational experiments, it demonstrates a much faster search of the design space using the emergent parallel search, leading to ‘self-organisation’ of the designed system in real time.

The method presented, optimises the search of the design space and results in better and more robust designs. The original design method developed in this work promotes a shift in design methodologies influencing design approaches, practice, design thinking, or traditional systems thinking based on the top-down approach. The bottom-up approach based on emergence leads to the opening up of new possibilities for design, pushes the boundaries of existing practice and introduces culture change in systems approaches to design. The Design Journal is an international publication, where publication reflects the wide ranging potential impact of this method.

The work on emergent modeling of structures was partially funded by the EPSRC.