Armand Hatchuel

Towards Design Theory and Expandable Rationality: The Unfinished Program of Herbert Simon

It is said that Herbert Simon would have described himself as follows : «I am a monomaniac. What I am a monomaniac about is decision making ». In spite of its shares of legend and humour, this self-portrait deeply reflects the main logic of Herbert Simon’s works. From his early papers on administrative behaviour to his last investigations on thought and learning, Simon kept a same goal : to explain complex and mysterious human behaviour by simple and constrained, yet informed, decision rules. « Bounded rationality » was the name he gave to a research orientation wich rejected the maximizing behaviour assumed by classic economics. But beyond this critical aim, Simon attempted to build an empirically grounded theory of human problem solving. A theory that was intended to settle the foundation stone of « behavioural economics ».

A theoretical analysis of creativity methods in engineering design: casting and improving ASIT within C–K theory

Approaches to supporting creativity are diverse and numerous. Making sense of these methods, including the comparative benefits of one approach over another is highly significant to both research and practice of creative design. This paper demonstrates the benefit of conducting analyses of methods with the aid of a theory. Such an approach provides a clear basis for analysing different methods that could in turn be compared with each other. This approach is demonstrated through the critical analysis of advanced systematic inventive thinking (ASIT) – a practical method – using the C–K theory, a design theory that offers a formal model of creative thinking. The analysis uncovers a paradox in ASIT operation: being creative while ‘staying in the box’. While confirming that ASIT could be perceived as an implementation of some of the C–K constructs, the analysis further resolves the paradox by explaining how creative solutions could be created with ASIT. Finally, the analysis also exposes the capabilities and limitations of ASIT as well as its directions of improvement by extending ASIT operators and applying them in a linear manner.

Teaching innovative design reasoning: How concept???knowledge theory can help overcome fixation effects

Abstract How can we prepare engineering students to work collectively on innovative design issues, involving ill-defined, “wicked” problems? Recent works have emphasized the need for students to learn to combine divergent and convergent thinking in a collaborative, controlled manner. From this perspective, teaching must help them overcome four types of obstacles or “fixation effects” (FEs) that are found in the generation of alternatives, knowledge acquisition, collaborative creativity, and creativity processes. We begin by showing that teaching based on concept–knowledge (C-K) theory can help to manage FEs because it helps to clarify them and then to overcome them by providing means of action. We show that C-K theory can provide scaffolding to improve project-based learning (PBL), in what we call project-based critical learning (PBCL). PBCL helps students be critical and give due thought to the main issues in innovative design education: FEs. We illustrate the PBCL process with several cases and show precisely where the FEs appear and how students are able to overcome them. We conclude by discussing two main criteria of any teaching method, both of which are usually difficult to address in situations of innovative design teaching. First, can the method be evaluated? Second, is the chosen case “realistic” enough? We show that C-K-based PBCL can be rigorously evaluated by teachers, and we discuss the circumstances in which a C-K-based PBCL may or may not be realistic.

The Interplay between Creativity Issues and Design Theories: A New Perspective for Design Management Studies?

In this article, we analyse the relationship between creativity issues and design theory. Although these two notions seem to correspond to different academic fields (psychology, cognitive science and management for creativity; engineering science and logic for design theory), they appear to be deeply related when it comes to design methods and management. Analysing three historical moments in design theory building (the 1850s, with the ratio method for industrial upgrading in Germany, the 20th century with systematic design, and the 1920s with the Bauhaus theory), we point to the dialectical interplay that links creativity and design theory, structured around the notion of ‘fixation effect’: creativity identifies fixation effects, which become the targets of new design theories; design theories invent models of thought to overcome them; and, in turn, these design theories can also create new fixation effects that will then be designated by creativity studies. This dialectical interplay leads to regular inventions of new ways of managing design, i.e., new ways of managing knowledge, processes and organizations for design activities. We use this framework to analyse recent trends in creativity and design theories.

Perspectives on design creativity and innovation research

The aim of this extended editorial is to offer a perspective on design creativity and innovation research on the occasion of launching the International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation. Thirty six members of the editorial board present their expectations, views, or opinions on the topics of the journal. All of these articles are presented in Section 2. In Section 3, summaries of the 36 articles are consolidated. This editorial also analyzes keywords from each of the articles, and the results are visualized in Section 4. The keyword analysis covers not only those words taken directly from each of the articles but also the implicit keywords that are suggested by the explicit ones. We believe this extended editorial will help the researchers, in particular young researchers, comprehend the essence of design creativity and innovation research and obtain a clue to tackle the new discipline.The aim of this extended editorial is to offer a perspective on design creativity and innovation research on the occasion of launching the International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation. Thirty six members of the editorial board present their expectations, views, or opinions on the topics of the journal. All of these articles are presented in Section 2. In Section 3, summaries of the 36 articles are consolidated. This editorial also analyzes keywords from each of the articles, and the results are visualized in Section 4. The keyword analysis covers not only those words taken directly from each of the articles but also the implicit keywords that are suggested by the explicit ones. We believe this extended editorial will help the researchers, in particular young researchers, comprehend the essence of design creativity and innovation research and obtain a clue to tackle the new discipline.

Platforms for the design of platforms: collaborating in the unknown

This chapter explores how industry platforms can be designed using specific collaborative relationships that also take the form of platforms.

A foundationalist perspective for management research: a European trend and experience

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss, among alternative European currents, a “foundationalist perspective for management research” (FPM) which redefines the identity, rigor and relevance of management research.Design/methodology/approach – The management literature has documented a wide range of criticisms about standard management research which are most often summarized as “the relevance gap” or the “translation problem”. The paper presents the historical development, in the French context, of an epistemological debate about management as an academic field which led to FPM as an alternative to standard approaches and as a solution to such criticisms. In this approach, the identity of management science, its principles of relevance and its definition of rigor, cannot be defined separately.Findings – FPM offers a consistent approach of management research as a science that studies “models of collective action”. Rigor is redefined as the appropriate combination of different types o...

The Interplay Between Design and Mathematics: Introduction to Bootstrapping Effects

In spite of common perceptions, design and mathematics have much in common in the way they are practiced and in their results. Understanding the interplay between design and mathematics could therefore, lead to mutual benefits to both disciplines. This paper introduces this subject and focuses on one benefit that could arise from a tight transfer of knowledge between design and mathematics that bootstraps progress in both disciplines.Copyright

Managing Creation and Learning of New Expertise in Automobile Development Projects

Performance in a car project has numerous dimensions and hinges on the fragile quality and coherence of the technical compromises reached throughout the design process. Besides the traditional performance criteria such as cost, quality or delay, new ones (security, depollution, recycling, acoustics, consumption, etc.) have been recently introduced in the management of car projects. For each of these criteria new experts have emerged and prescribe specifications to designers. The accumulation of these specifications and their degree of intelligibility threaten the learning capacities of designers and consequently the innovative capacity of projects. Furthermore, given the limited resources (in staff and time) that can be spent on learning new expertise, it seems that the best answer would be to invent new design practices which enhance efficiency. In the following text we define the characteristics of a new learning model by examining, in particular, the management tools used to stimulate, build and steer such learning. The introduction of new recycling expertise at Renault, studied by the authors over the past four years, and the intervention strategy that was imagined in that case, is used to illustrate these different points.

On generic Epistemology

Abstract This text proposes a generic epistemology, relatively independent of any discipline, with the aim of understanding newly emerging scientific objects and disciplines, as well as new logics of interdisciplinarity. This epistemology is also relatively independent of the present, requiring a thinking of the future as something other than the realization of the present ; somewhat like that suggested by the practice of scenario planning. It does not supplant “disciplinary; epistemology, but seeks to demonstrate, through their simultaneous exercise, the passage from a critical to a fictional paradigm, where disciplines are decentred and philosophies immersed in the sciences ; not the “established; sciences we know from descriptions constructed along the lines of classical disciplines, but emergent or future sciences, for which the intention of the researcher is constitutive. The question is no longer that of the criteria of scientificity, but that of the identity of science.