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Abductive Inferences in Strategic Design Decisions

Part of: Design Management

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Ehud Kroll  and
Lauri Koskela
Ehud Kroll*
Affiliation:
ORT Braude College;
Lauri Koskela
Affiliation:
University of Huddersfield
*
Contact: Kroll, Ehud, ORT Braude College, Mechanical Engineering, Israel, kroll@braude.ac.il

Abstract

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The overall strategy of designing is addressed. The design decisions that have a major impact on the direction in which the process evolves are termed “strategic”, and here we study them from the perspective of abduction. The aim is to clarify the role of abduction (in the sense of inference to the best explanation) in strategic decision making in design. Four cases are used for demonstration and discussion: functional decomposition in novel situations; the ordering of subfunctions in a function structure; the order of development of design tasks; and managing the design iterations. We focus on two specific design strategies: systematic design and parameter analysis, and show that strategic abductions often take place within the chosen strategy for the sake of efficiency of the process. Such abductions are often triggered by rules (like focusing first on the issue with greatest uncertainty in the total design task) that derive from Peirce's principle for economy of research. It is found that strategic abductions may have a decisive impact on the outcome of a design process. Two potential ways of improving design strategies and related strategic abductions are discussed.

Keywords

AbductionCreativityDesign cognitionDesign process
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 1055 - 1064
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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