Innovation and design of complex systems

System design is one of the key issues in industrial R&D today. The underlying logic is essentially guided by the economic potential that the customer can bring to the company through the sale of a product or system identified as a unit. The system exists because it is the catalyst for an exchange that is first and foremost commercial, before it carries a use value or a need that is part of a social practice. The criteria of the design process are primarily constrained by the revenue potential that the system can bring to the company. The design and manufacturing functions thus tend to be structured to produce large quantities of similar units at low cost. This process generates objects with a dual characteristic: on the one hand, a lack of variety, and on the other, the need to fit them into a pre-existing category already historically identified and recognizable by the customer, such as shoes, medicine or a car. From the user's point of view, the most frequently voiced criticisms concern difficulties in using the system in an environment not always foreseen by the designer. Two major aspects emerge:

• product or system functionalities do not correspond to a real need in context ;

• the user has to conform to a model that he or she will not be able to grasp without a long period of adaptation and that is culturally beyond his or her reach.

The two extremes are, for example, wi-fi modems that are difficult to parameterize without being a network specialist, or fully automatic machines that no longer care about their owners during lengthy automatic software updates. At the design level, designers have a "natural" tendency to substitute themselves for users. The process of specifying product or system functionalities is traditionally guided by a technology they master from their own field of knowledge and its own constraints (technical, financial).

The design process tends to be overdetermined by an industrial culture underpinned by an essentially mechanistic paradigm. This orientation tends to reproduce an object without changing its functional assembly structure. The basic structure of a car (or an airplane), for example, has not evolved in the last hundred years. What's more, designers still have difficulty thinking about all the environments associated with the object and its various possible uses during its mission. Although increasingly linked to research and development departments, the designer transforms the partial representation he has of the user into his own model. The designer is often guided by technical standards, which results in a highly constrained product or system, in the sense that the user has to comply with the object's requirements. The tension between...