Abstract

Complex design comes in many guises, e.g. “complexity engineering”, “wicked problems” and span many domains and design contexts. However, practitioners working on complex design problems rarely share their solutions, most likely because they are closely tied to the nature of the systems they are addressing, e.g. it would be unusual for city planners and roboticists to share their problem-solving approaches with each other despite the fact that the problems they are facing have very similar characteristics. In this talk I will summarise two interview studies with specialists in Synthetic Biology and Swarm Robotics, which identify three domain-general aspects of complex design. I will then describe how a framework built from these three domain-general aspects of complex design practice allow the practices in the two fields to be shared and compared, and discuss how this approach might be generalised to share and compare practices within and between different design contexts