The world around us is constantly moving in the direction from simple to complex, there are more and more ideas. Most often these ideas are spontaneous, not shaped into a concrete real task. Like Marx’s “ghost,” ideas wander in people’s heads. Some are embodied in real projects, while others, having made a lot of noise, lose their relevance and are consigned to oblivion.
In our environment there is a very narrow and one-sided understanding of the word design. The vast majority reduces this concept to purely applied, design and decoration. This includes color, morphology, the placement of large and small objects in space, the place of light, sound, the natural environment, household items, the working environment – all that is perceived by our senses. Where does the confusion begin?
Let’s take, for example, the staging of a still life. You can paint a still life as it is, without rearranging the objects, without changing their position relative to each other, without taking into account their light and color, without paying attention to the shape, background color, perspective and perspective, and the size of the canvas. And certainly not to think about the future perception of the viewer, the mood created. Get up at an easel and start painting. If there is a place for design?
Design (project, idea, plan) appears in the artist’s mind when his keen, special sense of color and light makes him perceive the trivial shape of an object vividly, expressively, seeking various ways to bring it to the viewer. He mentally arranges the main and secondary details of the canvas, selects the gamma. Look at very stingy still lifes by Henri Matthies with poorly painted fruit. Everything else on the canvas makes these works unique masterpieces.
So we came to the conclusion that design is not a result, design is one of the most important creative methods that we resort to today in all areas of our existence. Wikipedia lists 18 types of design. But this is not the limit. Any kind of creative activity requires a design problem. What is the peculiarity of this method?
The method of formation of design solutions involves the formation of the request by the consumer, but only a professional in a particular subject area can bring any idea to develop a specific vector of movement in the right direction or a complete, i.e. working for the benefit of society as a whole, creation. This is the dialectic of the search for design solutions. Design solutions can be divided into two directions: the formation of business projects and the improvement of the technology of any real process.
If the first direction lies in the speculative realm, and affects the activities of a relatively narrow management elite responsible for decisions, then the second, ultimately, is the essence of technological progress. This process can involve entire industries, production teams, and a significant resource base.
The setting of the task is crucial. Miscalculations and mistakes made at this stage of modeling can cause irreversible losses.
It is no accident analysts say that 50% of all time is spent on this important stage (20-30% – on development, the same amount of time on the experiment and analysis of results).
Problem statement includes:
- A clear, explicit understanding of the problem;
- a comprehensive study of the simulation object;
- fuller analysis of all available information;
- identification of relevant factors, i.e. not only an assessment of the degree of correspondence, but also of the degree of practical applicability of the result, and the degree of social applicability of the solution variant of the problem;
- search and formulation of possible alternatives;
- determination of limits, tolerances and restrictions;
- use of quality criteria;
- determining the depth and scope of the experiment to be conducted;
- the final stage – problem formulation.
In the practice of problem formulation design may be a situation where it is necessary to refine or reconstruct an existing system, then some of the above conditions fall away and the researcher can immediately move from the stage of studying the full information to the search for the best and most effective alternative that best meets the new objectives.
But when the need to create new systems (structures) arises in the socio-economic sphere, researchers often deliberately neglect the accumulated experience and strive to create a new management structure. (This desire is commonly referred to as “reinventing the wheel”). This approach leads to a considerable expenditure of time and effort on mastering the new management structures, training, and retraining.
If we turn to the experience of creating employment agencies in the Russian Federation, the miscalculation of the task setters (probably quite deliberate) becomes obvious. Under the existing structure of managing labor processes in society – new bodies are created instead of eliminating parallelism and organizing interaction between federal and regional labor bodies. Employees of newly created employment centers were more engaged in creating working conditions – construction of buildings, modern housing for specialists, than in solving specific tasks of the newly created service.
There are quite a few such examples in the management system (federal agencies, federal treasuries and regional financial structures). As a result, we got a cumbersome system of management, several times the size of the Soviet bureaucracy, with a characteristic collective irresponsibility for any, no matter how complex, business.
Today, by setting design goals is very often understood as a “Startup” in the creation of your own business. Indeed, all the stages of creating a design solution, we find in the creation of a business model from idea to project launch. Of course, the viability of such a project is evaluated by real results. There is no room for experimentation. Especially since the environment (consumers) is amorphous and unpredictable.
Setting a design problem in mathematical modeling is most common in programming, in creating multitask analytical systems, in processing huge amounts of different data. When creating any project we can no longer do without a clear understanding of the problems and the ways to solve them. Clearly formulated and calculated terms of reference become an obligatory attribute of any undertaking. And yet, we still very often observe in real life a picture where a scientifically sound statement of design problem is replaced if not by voluntarism, then by simple stupidity.