Jonas, Wolfgang, "Systems Thinking in Industrial Design", 1996
ua435
An earlier work of the author (JONAS 1994) proposes a systems theoretic framework for design. It seems to be possible to describe design as a cyclic multilevel (society, sub-systems, companies, teams, individuals) communication process of production and consumptions with partly deterministic/ controllable and partly self-organizing areas. It was possible to verify certain hypotheses comprising elements in two adjacent levels (or better: to reproduce certain observations) by means of system dynamics (Stella II Version 2.2.2). Emergence-and-attractor-phenomena could be visualized. Theory building is continued (it seems necessary for design to avoid adopting a brand new stylish theory every decade), but without using simulation tools, at the moment.