RATIONALITY IN DESIGN Peter Kroes, Maarten Franssen and Louis Bueciarelli 1 INTRODUCTION Engineering design has many faces, ranging from the almost exclusively Function ally oriented desig of new materials and technical cevives in fields like mechanical ‘and electrical engineering, to strongly aesthetically oriented design projects that may be encountered in incstrial and architectural cesign.? Likewise, rationality has many faces, some of which are oriented to specific fields or disciplines, such 1s economic, scientific and technological rationality, whereas others refer to ge eral conceptions of rationality, such as theoretical and practical rationality. On ‘the one hand, this stato of affairs makes a discussion of rationality in ongincering cesign not an easy matter; on the other hand it may explain why there are so nny diverging opinions on the role of rationality in enginesring design. Son anthors take rationality to be of paramount importance for engineering design it is a basic assumption of one of the major paradigins in design methodology ‘that engincering-dosign practice is or onght to be a form of rational problem solv ing [Simon, 1969/1996; Dorst, 1997]. But there is also widespread recognition of ‘the importance for innovative designs of artistic and/or creative aspects that are assnmed to he not suscentible to rational problem-solvins: methods. assumed to be not susceptible to rational problem-solving methods. Our aim is to present a systematic overview of the different kinds of rationality issues that may come up with regard to engineering-design practice, The main question we explore is in what sense and to what extent a design process can be considered a rational process. It is a premise of much work done in the field of design methodology and engineering design itself that rationality plays significant role in design processes, not only’at the level of the organization of design processes, but also at the level of the design of products. The underlying idea is that many of the decisions that are made regarding design — regardless of whether they coucem the set-up and execution of the design process or the object of design itself — can be justified on the basis of reasons (arguments). ‘These reasons are supposed to show that, given the aim of the design process and given the varions possible courses of action, a specific course of action is to be preferred above all possible other ones because it leads more directly or effectively to the aim pursued, Tin his paper we will concentrate on the design of material technical artefacts; we see, how- fever, no resson why the results of our analysis would not he applicable to the design of technical processes aud services involving technical artefacts Handbooks of the Philosophy of Scionce. Volume 9: Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Volume editor: Anthonie Meijers. General editors: Dov M. Gabbay, Peul Thagard and John Woods © 2009 Elsevier BV. All rights reserved.This course of action is, then, the most ‘rational’ way to proceed? and a ‘rational’ engineer is supposed to choose that action. However, as we will show, engineering, practice is more complicated than this simple picture suggests, 2 ENGINEERING DESIGN Engineering design, as defined by Accreditation Board for Engineering and ‘Tech- nology (ABET), “is the process of devising a system, component, or process to meet desired needs. It is a decision-making process (often iterative), in whick the asic science and mathematics and engineering sciences are applied to convert re- sources optimally to meet a stated objective.” The ‘desized needs’ referred to in this quotation are usually called customer needs. In a process of translation, spec- ification and reduction, these needs are transformed into functional requirements and these again into design specifications.* The list of design specifications ~ usn- ally a list of physical parameters — may be taken to be the stated objective of an engincering-design project. If the designed object meets all the specifications, it is, supposed to be able to perform the desired function. Whether that is indeed the case depends on whether the list of design specifications acleqnately captures the functional requirements. If, moreover, there is a good match between the customer needs and the list of functional requirements, the designed object will contribute to satisfying the customer needs. ‘The above definition characterizes the things that are designed by engineers very broadly as “systems, components, or processes”. Indeed such things range from mass-produced computers to unique oil platforms, from telephones to high rise buildings, from components to complex systems, from micro-organisms to software, and so forth. Correspondingly there is also much variety in engine design practices. In some practices the design phase inchides the actual making and testing of prototypes of the designed object, in others, the making of a specimen of the designed object is not considered part of the design phase. In some, aesthetic criteria are of paramount importance, in others not. Seme design projects may be performed by a single designer, others require large, mmltidisciplinary teams of design engineers. There is also much variety in the kind of design problems to be solved. Vincenti [1990, p. 60), for example, distinguishes between normal and radical design and between design tasks high and low in the design hierarehy. In spite of this variety, a number of different kinds of activities may be dis guished in engineering-design processes, namely 2 The measure of rationality of an action may come in degrees; @ person or action may be rational to a certain extent, Whenever in the following we will refer to persoas/actions as being rational or not, this has to be interpreted as including all cases where they areconsiderel rational to a certain degree Shetp://www.me.unlv.edu /Undergraduate /coursenotes/meg497 /ABETdefinition.htm; accessed September 28, 2006. “4So0 te contribution by De Vries in this Volume,‘Translation of customer needs into fimctional requirements and these again into design specifications: © Generation of a range of viable options Selection of one of the options; and Justification of the final design proposal. These activities are not necessarily linearly ordered in times design processes may contain many iterations and feedback loops between these different kinds of activ- ities. A more careful look at the outcome of design processes shows that it is not simply a (description of a) technical artifact, but that it also comprises the mamual. that is, instructions that tell the user how to handle the technical artifact such that it will perform its technical function correctly. Both the manual and the technical artifact can be seen as elements of a use plan. A use plan is a considered series of actions to achieve a certain end with the help of a technical artifact necessary for executing the use plan (for more details about use plans, see [Houkes et al, 2002). The designing of technical artifacts by engineers can therefore be seen as linked to the specification, or even design, of use plans. If attention is restricted to the object to be designed, the engincering-design process starts with a phase in which a functional description of this object is ‘translated’ into a structural description. A purely functional description of an object ‘black-boxes’ it the object and describes it in terms of desired input-output relations. In contrast, a structural description concentrates on the physical characteristics of the object. This may take two forms. The outcome of the design process is usually a descrip- tion of the object, the blueprint of the artifact, which specifies everything that mmmst be known in order to manufacture it. This description is often limited to the specification of materials to be used and to geometrical properties of the various components. Implicit in this description is a structural description of the artifact in another sense, which contains all of its physical and chemical properties that allow the designing engineers to predict how the artifact will hehave under various put conditions. How much of the content of the black box, ie. which part of ‘the many physical characteristics of the object under design, is in actual design practice already fixed at the beginning of the design process depends strongly on the nature (radical or normal) of the design task. Finally, as the ABET definition describes it, engineering design is a decision- making process. This involves decision making on different levels, at different stages and about different kinds of issues. Decisions have to be made on setting the objective of the design process, on redefining the objective when the original objective tums out not to be feasible, on how to spend the available resources, on how many options are to be pursued, on which options to drop because they are iternal structure; it is oriented towards the environment of 3See the contribution by Kroes i this Volume; see also [Sroes, 2002]too problematic, on which options to develop further because they are promising, on what criteria of evaluation to use for making the final choice, on which option to choose, and so forth. These different kinds of often ill-defined and intercon- nected decision situations, together with unpredictable changes in the context of the design process that may affect resources and time schedules, make engineering- design practices often messy and unruly. What room for rational decision making is there in such practices’? 3 APPLYING STANDARDS OF RATIONALITY TO ENGINEERING DESIGN Engineers and design methodologists are interested in studying rationality in de- sign processes primarily because they hope and expect that by explicating and st atie procedures for design, they will be able to improve design practice. ‘The intuitive notion of rationality underlying this line of thought is related to the idea that there are better and worse ways — relatively systematic and relatively chaotic ways — of solving engineering-design problems and of making engineering-design decisions. According to such an interpretation of rationality, rationalizing design terminates in a sue- articulating the various roles of rationality and by applying rationality in practice will enhance the likelihood thet the design proc cessful design. With this rough idea of rationality in mind, let us start by asking how the ratio- nality of the way actual design processes are performed or set up may be analyzed. On this issue it may be helpful to borrow the notion of rational reconstruction from the philosophy of science, In discussions abont rationality in science it has become ish between rational reconstructions of more or less standard practice to disting science and actual scientific practices. This distinetion goes back to Carnap. He describes a rational reconstruction of the formation of a concept as “a schematized description of an imaginary procedure, consisting of rationally prescribed steps, which would lead to essentially the same results as the actual ps logical pro- cess” [Carnap, 1963, p. 16]. A rational reconstruction of the formation of a theory in science, for instance, is a rationally prescribed series of steps, which may in- volve performing experiments and choices among sets of alternative theories, that leads ‘logically’ to the same end result that the historical process ended in. These rationally prescribed steps are often not clearly identifiable in the actual actions and deci tists who have contributed to the discovery of the theory. This does not make their actions and actual reasoning processes by definition ir- rational. On this point we have to take account of the difference between rational reasoning and rational behavior (for more details, see Subsection 4.3). 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