A New Perspective for Risk Management: A Study of the Design of Generic Technology with a Matroid Model in C-K Theory - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 189

13.2 Part 1: Setting the Issue : Beyond Decision Making,
Generic Concepts to Design low Risk Alternatives
13.2.1 Models for the Interaction Design/Environment:
The Limits of Decision Paradigm
The notion of risk characterizes the consequences of an event for an actor. The
event is considered as a “stroke of fortune” (and rather misfortune). If one adds
some restrictive hypotheses on the structure of risks (these hypotheses will be
discussed later), then a risk can be quantified as the product between the probability
of the event and the consequences of this event for the actor.
More generally, without the restrictive hypothesis, one can consider risk as
the relationship between, on the one hand, a “design space”, where design uses,
generates and transforms propositions and possibly leads to new artefacts; and,
on the other hand, an “external” world, which can or shall not be transformed by
design (it is “out of reach” of the design, it is considered as the states of nature that
can't be changed), but which can interact (and even strongly) with the design.
The “external world” is “invariant” by design (Hatchuel et al. 2013 ) . But precisely
for this reason, it plays a critical role: as an invariant, it strongly configures the
design dynamic and strategies.
We can name many examples of such invariants: for instance, weather condi-
tions: a design can be robust or sensitive to weather conditions, it will not influence
the weather; norms, standards, design rules, consumer behavior, “production con-
straints”, “process capabilities” ... all are examples of such invariants in the exter-
nal world. Risks are of this sort: for certain (many?) designs, terrorist attack,
tsunami, earthquake, or just rain ... are constraints of the external world that can't
be influenced by these same designs but can influence them.
Two streams of research treat these kinds of constraints from the external world:
1. In a design perspective, a large stream of research, in particular in the US, has
discussed the relationship between the design and its environment. In the 1960s,
Alexander proposed to consider design as the creation of a relationship between
a “form” and a “context”. Drawing the boarder between form and context is
exactly the task of the designer, and, for Alexander, it can be considered as a dual
process of problem setting and problem solving (Alexander 1964 ) , which can be
supported by more or less sophisticated and abstract patterns. Alexander pro-
poses actually a dynamic process that leads to the stabilization of a set of
“specifications” that characterize the way the “context” is taken into account
in the design space. Alexander actually opens two difference perspectives to deal
with robustness, that are deepened in other approaches:
- On the one hand, the issue is to deal with a fixed set of functional require-
ments. More generally in many design theories and methods, “functions” or
“functional requirements” precisely appear to play the same role than by
Alexander: they represent the influence of the context on the design space