Product Development as a Complex Social System

Abstract

You can sometimes wonder that product development creates successful products, while it seems to be quite a chaotic process. Product development is often not as rational as it is regarded in theory, as a sequence of logical steps, the use of clear rules, the calculation of parameters, etc. Research tries to capture the design rational for individual designers or small groups. But products, especially mechatronic products of a certain size such as cars or aeroplanes, have become more and more complex and so have the processes and organisations for their development, including thousands of engineers. While both more complex products require more complex organisations and more complex organisations make more complex products possible, the problem is how to manage this complexity. Call it rationality, call it transparency, call it control, they all decrease when complexity increases; though common design methodology helps a lot [1], it can hardly manage these processes completely: A lot of problems in industry still cannot be solved by design research; some phenomena cannot even be described adequately. At the same time, a lot of academic methods and tools cannot be applied by industry. It does not help declaring academia and industry two independent domains or to disavow those problems due to courtesies. There is a need for new approaches and a new understanding of product development. The answer might be another level of product development, where other principles apply than mere rationality, creativity or the like. This level is the complex social level of product development.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.