The practice and ethics of design

Abstract

This article is part of a larger research that synthesizes what various strains of contemporary systems theory have to say about social processes and assays the quality of their collective explanations. In this research, I condensed 30 major works of authors such as Prigogine, Eigen, Csanyi, Maturana, Varela, Bickerton, Habermas, Luhmann, Alexander and Colomy, Churchman, Checkland, Jackson, Ulrich, Flood, Kauffman, Gell-Mann, Kampis, Goertzel, Lakoff, Laszlo, Artigiani, Masulli, Banathy, and Warfield. I then used the condensation process to distill out key statements in these summaries that concerned the application of systems theory to social processes; and to sort those statements, on the basis of content analysis, into the areas of the practice and ethics of design, the structure of the social world, communication, cognition, and epistemology. This article deals with the standards that are proposed by these authors for the practice and ethics of design. It employs the hermeneutic method of virtual conversation, which is enabled by the use of the CogniScope™, a computer-assisted methodology for dealing with complex and cross-disciplinary design situations. It generates an enhancement pattern that exhibits the relative influence that the standards, if implemented, would have on each other. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.