Design Worldview

Principles of Design Composition, Systems Thinking, and Decision Making
1. Auflage 2028
ISBN: 978-3-11-227465-1
Verlag: De Gruyter

Buch, Englisch, Band 1, 400 Seiten, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 240 mm

Reihe: De Gruyter STEM

Design is ubiquitous. We live in a world that is either natural or designed. Everything artificial around us has been designed by humans, whether they were trained as designers or not. Noting this ubiquity and universality of design as a discipline, Simon– a polymath and a Nobel laureate in economics, argues that we must view and study design as a science– the science of the artificial. This book adopts and promotes a Design Science perspective.  

My years of research and teaching have convinced me that the potential of design as a fundamental decision-making approach remains undertapped. Despite the popularity of a few design thinking frameworks, there is limited awareness of its overarching potential across different domains. This situation is aggravated by the fact that many design principles remain highly subjective in popular discourse, reducing an untrained person's confidence in the discipline. Yet these principles are not the exclusive preserve of trained designers. A basic understanding of them can enhance decision-making across every domain — from composing a visual artwork to structuring an organisation, designing a policy, planning a career, or simply making better choices in everyday life.

This is the first book in a series that views various facets of life, problem solving, and decision making through the design lens. While written in the spirit of design science, the topics covered date back to design principles that have long been intuitively used and discussed by artists, designers, design educators, and practitioners. Unlike other books on design that focus on the cognitive design process — on how to think — this book focuses on the elements of the problem-solution context and the principles that govern their relationships. The twelve principles covered — balance, order, harmony, unity, contrast, proportion, repetition, movement, emphasis, framing, whitespace, and touchpoint. Even within the modern design science research community, these compositional principles have received little scientific attention and empirical rigour, while the majority of research has focused on the cognitive design process. Their discussion has remained largely confined to trained designers, while a basic grasp of these principles can arguably enhance all facets of life for all of us.

It offers a unique, scientific approach to understanding and applying these principles — one that becomes particularly relevant as AI and generative design emerge as powerful new paradigms for creating and evaluating design compositions. Each principle is explored through a common analytical framework, applied consistently across all twelve chapters, allowing readers to build a structured and cumulative understanding. Cross-domain examples are drawn from visual arts, product design, engineering, organisational design, policy, and everyday life, alongside reflective exercises and both intuitive and computational approaches to applying each principle. 

To address the gap in objective, accessible treatments of design composition, this book provides a structured set of tools and methods to support the application of these principles to diverse problem-solving contexts. By mastering them, you will learn exactly what elements to consider in a given situation, how to identify their interdependencies, and how to effectively compare and choose among alternatives.

The book is written in a popular book style and narrative for wider consumption, while remaining backed by academic rigour and research insights. It should be of as much interest to a design researcher as to a trained designer, an amateur artist, a design engineer, a systems thinker, a computational thinker, a policy maker, and a person who designs everyday aspects of their life without any formal training in design. This is a book for anyone looking to devise a plan for a more desirable future.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Singh, Vishal

Über Autor(innen)

Vishal Singh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design and Manufacturing (DM) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney (Sydney, Australia), a master’s in design from the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore, India), and a bachelor’s 
in architecture from Birla Institute of Technology (Ranchi, India). 

At IISc, Vishal teaches multiple courses including Elements and Principles of Design, Product Design, New Product Development, and Basics of Computing and AI for Design and Manufacturing. Before joining IISc, Vishal was an Assistant Professor in Department of Civil Engineering at Aalto University, Finland where he taught courses on Computer Integrated Design and Construction, and Construction Project Management. In Finland, Vishal also briefly served as an Innovation Director for the Data Driver Construction Hub at the Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. Vishal has also worked as a design researcher across multiple universities in Australia, including Deakin University, University of Newcastle, University of Technology Sydney, and the University of Sydney.  

During this 20+ years of academic experience across Australia, Finland and India, Vishal’s research has spanned various topics within design research, especially at the interface of design thinking, systems thinking and computational thinking. These research topics range from studies on assumption-making, agent-based modeling of complex systems, AI in design, algorithmic design, building information modeling, decision making, design management and design teams, distributed systems, generative design, information and knowledge management, innovation ecosystem, intelligent agents, multi-agent systems, product lifecycle management, situational awareness, system of systems, teams and teamwork. The research on these topics has resulted in 4 co-edited books, 44 journal articles, more than 120+ book chapters and conference papers. Vishal serves as associate editor for two international journals and besides serving as a reviewer across multiple journals spanning design research, building and construction, information science and computing, product lifecycle management, supply chain management, decision making, and so on.  

Besides academia, Vishal is active in design practice, entrepreneurship, and the start-up ecosystem. He is currently a co-founder at SpaCyPhy and Wegro, both research and design led spin-offs to emerge from his research group, the IMPACT4IMPACT Lab at the Indian Institute of Science.