C-K Theory – Foundations et implications of design theory

This article presents the C-K theory of design (C for concept, K for knowledge).

A competitive company is no longer content to simply improve its products, but regularly modifies their definition. These changes in the identity of the – object, which we have all seen on the "cell phones" that have become "smartphones" –, are a fundamental trend affecting all products (or services or business models or technologies). This new design regime calls for new methods, different from those of twentieth-century design offices.

In the 1990s, when this regime began to emerge, practitioners and researchers were faced with a conundrum: how to account for the paradox that innovation can produce something whose identity is different from what existed before, while at the same time being made of bricks that already existed? Solving this enigma – with the advantages of a good theory: rigor, control of reasoning, explanation of facts, highlighting of novel phenomena – offers a better understanding of the fundamental phenomena that we group together under the terms "creativity" or "invention". It is an invaluable aid to engineers, designers and conceptual planners, who are collectively faced with the task of setting up effective and rigorous "innovative design" processes.

The C-K theory articulates the theory of knowledge and the theory of creativity, which had previously been too rigorously separated. It starts from the observation that objects such as the designer's "brief", the technological wager, the architect's vision, are in fact propositions of the same type – perfectly rational and rigorous – which it characterizes as a "concept" (C). A concept is a proposition that has no logical status. This is what distinguishes it from knowledge (K). Given a logic, a concept is a proposition that is neither true nor false with respect to this logic. The proposition is undecidable. The C-K theory thus distinguishes two spaces, one where propositions have a logical status (the K space) and the other where propositions are undecidable (the C space). A direct consequence of these definitions is that these spaces have very different structures, but interact according to invariant and "expansive" mechanisms: they simultaneously produce new objects and new knowledge. In C-K theory, the world of creative ideation, of chimeras, of "desirable unknowns" (the space of C concepts) systematically dialogues with the world of knowledge, of models of the known, of laws and beliefs (K space). The theory shows that innovative design is neither a simple exercise in creativity, nor a mere increase in knowledge about what already exists. It models the double expansion process of the unknown and the known, one stimulating the other. Knowledge stimulates creation, and creation stimulates...