Innovation and organisation: towards an art of social system design

A new field of design activity is emerging, where the focus of designers is being directed towards seeking innovative resolutions to organisational problems that are beyond the reach of traditional fields of design. The objects of design are immaterial; they are the concepts and structures that shape and direct the complex social systems that we all inhabit. Design thinking, design in thought and language, is central to this new field, however there is yet to emerge a substantial and coherent body of research into the theoretical foundations and effective methodological frameworks as a basis for the ongoing development of this field of design practice. This thesis makes an argument for this new design, named here as social system design, the primary characteristic of which concerns relational invention of, and in, thought and language. Firstly, a perspective is developed on design that is sufficiently broad as to encompass immaterial invention and production. This perspective is brought together with a description of the distinctive and special characteristics of human, or social, systems in order to enable the key criteria for social system design to be outlined, if it is to be relevant to innovation, in and of, complex relational settings. The fundamental premise that this thesis examines is furnished by Richard Buchanan, who, in positioning design as a new ‘liberal art of technological culture’, argues that the discipline is a modern incarnation of rhetoric. This could be easily dismissed if Buchanan had in mind the degraded and fractured rhetoric received into modernity. However his argument gains solid footing as he looks to rhetoric in its ancient forms, when it was constituted as a dynamic art of relational inversion and judgement in idea and word concerning the best courses of social and civic action. Rhetoric plays a central part in developing the arguments for both theory and method for social system design in this thesis, therefore making a contribution towards consolidating this as a recognised and viable field of design research and practice.