Progettare nella societa' della conoscenza

The book addresses the problem of design in the information society by focusing on two different domains of application: the technical and engineering domain and the instructional domain. Design problems are notoriously complex, ‘wicked’ i.e. they have no definitive or exhaustive formulation, and hardly affordable with rationalistic methods. They are not given but must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations which are puzzling, troubling, and uncertain. The book is organized into two main parts. The first one is concerned with design in the engineering field. After having introduced some basic concepts (e.g. the concept of artifact, symbolic model, modeling and model based reasoning, meta models and ontologies) the attention if focused on the main conceptualizations and methods of the design activity proposed in the last fifty years. Discussed models have been selected on the base of the point of view taken about design, task coverage, generality, and detail. Design is viewed as a process of: i) search and problem solving, ii) constraint satisfaction, iii) object composition; iv) prototype, case or rule instantiation; v) symbolic models construction and transformation, vi) optimization, among the others. Moreover, this part addresses the relationships existing between the design activity and various inference processes (e.g. deduction, abduction, induction); between design and learning and differences among routine, innovative and creative design. The second part of the book is devoted to instructional design. Several conceptualizations and methods are illustrated ranging from traditional methods (e.g. ADDIE) to more recent ones based on constructivism and post constructivism with a particular attention to those methods that are based on modeling and model based reasoning. By comparing the evolution of methods in the two considered domains what emerges is a common and progressive movement from systematic models whose principal aim is to describe in more or less detail the decomposition of the design process in terms of a structured network of activities and sub-activities to models that take into account, besides the activities, the knowledge and cognitive processes involved within each activity, the role of symbolic representations in modeling and communication of design solutions, and the interaction of several contextual factors such as the influence of other stakeholders and of the socio-cultural context of the design activity. Finally, after an analysis and comparison of discussed models a new model for instructional design is proposed. The model considers instructional design as an activity of construction, transformation and composition of models taking place on three interrelated planes: i) the plane of educational values and goals (teleological plane) ; ii) the plane of didactic variables including instructional objectives, learning situations, epistemic themes, and design constraints (behavioral plane) and iii) the plane of instructional course of action (structural plane). The proposal is inspired to the situated version of FBS model proposed by Gero in the engineering domain which has been adapted and reformulated in order to take into account several desired requirements which are specific to the instructional field.