Some thought on the classification of design

When I work on the essay of what is engineering, I use the word “design” to set a boundary for the discipline of engineering. Naturally, I have to think about the meaning of design, why it could separate engineering from other domains. Finally, I build my statement on the four-category of systems design intruduced in Figueiredo’s paper (Figueiredo, 2008): design as functional analysis, design as problem-solving, design as problem-setting, and design as emergent evolutionary learning.

In my understanding, the classification of design into four categories is related to the complexity of the problems that engineers are going to tackle. I begin to analyze the engineering problems that require different category of the design process according to the structure and complexity of the problem. I am confused by the categorization of the problems that require design as emergent evolutionary learning with the problems that require design as problem-setting. In Figueiredo’s paper, design as emergent evolutionary learning is involved in dealing with “ill-structured and complex” problems - the problems are unclear at the started point, the goals are implicit, while design as problem-setting is involved in considering less “ill-structured” problems – the goals and criteria of the problems are unstated but could be discovered or negotiated. In such description, I think there is no clear borderline between these two kinds of problems. As a result, I wonder whether there is a clear classification between design as emergent evolutionary learning and design as problem-setting. When engineers take into account both the problems and their solution to understand a temporary situation (design as emergent evolutionary learning process) and then proceed to another temporary state in the problem-solving process, their decision-making process could also be seen as a kind of discovery of the implicit goals and frame of the problems (design as problem-setting).

In Bowker and Star’s paper, they doubted that there exists a real-world classification system that meets all three requirements listed in their paper. If my interpretation of unclear classification of the four categories of design is right, then it could serve as an example of violating the requirement of “the categories are mutually exclusive”. I become more interested in the examination of existing categorization that I could think about, which will definitely help me understand the theory of classification.