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 206

The dynamic model helps to understand why such an exploration can just work!
Apparently, such an exploration is very difficult, since “nature” doesn't speak in
advance and the new function can be everywhere! Still the dynamic model shows
what should be explored in such an exploration: (1) the risks that are not in F. In a
sense it restricts the exploration to brand new functions, it leads to better charac-
terize F and its structure to understand what is out of F and its structure; (2) the risks
are impacting the known technologies, usually in a negative way since it proves that
it is not robust to a new F.
Note that it explains why this kind of exploration was called “crazy concept”
exploration: it consists in exploring a concept that is “out” of the usual set of risks
(or market opportunity) and that can not be addressed with available knowledge!
13.5 Conclusion
In this paper we study generic concepts, ie concepts for artefacts that would be valid
for a large domain, ie for a large set of external conditions. We have shown that
these concepts can be derived from decision making theory and are of the form
given by Eq. ( 13.3 ). Equation ( 13.3 ) means that such a generic concept establishes
an “independence” with the set of possible contexts. We have then analyzed the
design based on a generic concept. We used a model derived from C-K theory with
matroids in K-space. We showed that the design process combines two different
operations, constant-rank extension and rank-increase extension and these proper-
ties explain critical properties of generic technologies as well as the limits of
evolutionary processes to design generic technologies. Finally we study dynamic
model for the design of generic technology and show that these dynamic models
account for “imperfect design” and could open new perspective for the study of
classical “risk management” in biology; the study of evolutionary processes.
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