Which Way of Designing?

Abstract

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. (Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969) I have organized many collaborative, multidisciplinary studies of major landscape change over more than 40 years at Harvard and in collaboration with other universities. The framework within which I organize most of my work and teaching strategies has been published in my recent book A Framework for Geodesign (Steinitz 2012). In this paper I will focus on one of the most significant decisions which the geodesign team must make when organizing the methods for its study: Which of the change models-which of the many ways of designing-shall we use? The change model which is selected may be the most important part of any professional or academic project because if the methods are unsatisfactory, then the products are also likely to be unsatisfactory. 2.2 The Framework for Geodesign The framework for geodesign consists of six questions that are asked (explicitly or implicitly) at least three times during the course of any geodesign study. They all have sub-questions that are modified as needed by the geodesign team. The answers to those questions are models, and their content and levels of abstraction are particular to the individual case study. Some modeling approaches can be general , but data and model parameters are local to the people, place, and time of the study.