GENERIC TECHNIQUE AND THE DYNAMICS OF TECHNOLOGIES: USING MATROID AND DESIGN THEORY TO DESIGN TECHNIQUES WITH SYSTEMIC IMPACT
Year: 2015
Editor: Christian Weber, Stephan Husung, Marco Cantamessa, Gaetano Cascini, Dorian Marjanovic, Srinivasan Venkataraman
Author: Le Masson, Pascal; Hatchuel, Armand; Kokshagina, Olga; Weil, Benoit
Series: ICED
Institution: Mines ParisTech, France
Section: Design Theory and Research Methodology, Design Processes
Page(s): 055-064
ISBN: 978-1-904670-65-0
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
As underlined in Arthur s book the nature of technology we are very knowledgeable on the design of objects, services or technical systems, but we don t know much on the dynamics of technologies. Still contemporary innovation often consists in designing techniques with systemic impact. They are pervasive both invasive and perturbing-, they recompose the family of techniques. Can we model the impact and the design of such techniques? More specifically: how can one design generic technology, ie a single technology that provokes a complete reordering of families of techniques? Recent advances in design theories open new possibilities to answer these questions. In this paper we use C-K design theory and a matroid-based model of the set of techniques to propose a new model (C-K/Ma) of the dynamics of techniques, accounting for the design of generic technologies. We show:
" F1: C-K/Ma offers a computational model for designing a technique with systemic impact.
" F2: C-K/Ma accounts for some phenomena associated to generic technology design.
" F3: C-K/Ma offers an efficient guide for the design of technologies with systemic impact, based on generativity and genericity criteria
Keywords: Dynamics Of Techniques, Generic Technologies, Design Theory