A typology of discrepancies in uncertainty perception in co-design process

Abstract

With the increasing sophistication of systems and complexity of social problems, co-design, which diverse designers with expertise in various fields participate in design process, is becoming general design practice. In this process, Designers drive design activities to reduce uncertainty (i.e., ambiguities in design requirement) to elaborate a design solution that fulfill the requirement by sharing and adapting each knowledge. Meanwhile, where heterogeneous designers with different backgrounds, beliefs and knowledge participate, uncertainty and its reduction direction are perceived uniquely for each designer. These discrepancies in the uncertainty perception and their reduction directions are barriers to the rational elaboration of design requirement and consensus building among designers. Therefore, it is necessary to proceed with design activities under a converges the discrepancies in their uncertainty perception through sharing the contents of uncertainty and its rationale that explains why designer perceives that uncertainty. This paper develops a typology of discrepancies in uncertainty perception among designers in co-design process. This paper firstly defines uncertainty and its relationship with elaboration of design requirement under the context of co-design through literature review of extant research related to uncertainty in design. Then, we developed a typology of the discrepancies through a set-theoretic formalization of the designers' thinking. The developed typology was applied to design experiment of toilet cleaning machine for identifying the discrepancies in the design process. The all discrepancies identified during its process could be classified into the typology. This result thus demonstrated certain validity and comprehensiveness of the developed typology.