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This book examines the theoretical foundations of the processes of planning and design. When people – alone or in groups – want to solve problems or improve their situation, they make plans. Horst Rittel studied this process of making plans and he developed theories – including his notion of \"wicked problems\" – that are used in many fields today. From product design, architecture and planning – where Rittel’s work was originally developed – to governmental agencies, business schools and software design, Rittel’s ideas are being used. This book collects previously unavailable work of Rittel’s within the framework of a discussion of Rittel’s theories and philosophical influences. Prologue Part 1: Foundations 1.1. Reflections On The Scientific And Political Significance Of Decision Theory 1.2. Science and Design Seminars: Introduction 1.3. Seminar 1: Modes of Innovation 1.4. Seminar 2: Images and Message 1.5. Seminar 3: Communications 1.6. Seminar 4: Establishing Order 1.7. Seminar 5: Measuring Values and Images 1.8. Seminar 6: Environments 1.9. Seminar 7: Design 1.10. Seminar 8: Models of and for Design 1.11. Seminar 9: Models of and for Design 2 1.12. Seminar 10: Conclusion Part 2: Wicked Problems 2.1. On the Planning Crisis Part 3: Design Reasoning 3.1. Structure and Usefulness of Planning Information Systems 3.2. Issues As Elements Of Information Systems 3.3. The Reasoning of Designers Part 4: Consequences of Design 4.1. Technological Change and Urban Structure 4.2. Pathologies of Planning. Epilogue Jean-Pierre Protzen is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. He was Horst Rittel’s colleague and collaborator for over twenty years and since Rittel’s death in 1990 has continued teaching Rittel’s work at Berkeley. David J. Harris was Protzen’s student at Berkeley, and his dissertation, \"Design Theory: From Scientific Method to Humanist Practice,\" relied heavily on Rittel’s work. He currently works as an editor and writing coach.

Real options methodology has long been proposed as an approach to making business decisions, and the field of engineering is no exception. It is valued today as an approach for the evaluation and optimization of engineering systems under uncertainty. This book presents and synthesizes the body of knowledge in the area of real options for engineering systems. Providing case studies at the end of each application chapter, it covers engineering applications across different disciplines such as industrial and civil engineering, and computer science. Step-by-step computations of real options valuation are included.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize, analyze, and demonstrate machine-understandable semantic process for validating, integrating, and processing technical design information. This establishes both a vision and tools for information reuse and semi-automatic processing in engineering design projects, including virtual machine laboratory applications with generated components. Design/methodology/approach: The process model has been developed iteratively in terms of action research, constrained by the existing technical design practices and assumptions (design documents, expert feedback), available technologies (pre-studies and experiments with scripting and pipeline tools), benchmarking with other process models and methods (notably the RUP and DITA), and formal requirements (computability and the critical information paths for the generated applications). In practice, the work includes both quantitative and qualitative components. Findings: Technical design processes may be greatly enhanced in terms of semantic process thinking, by enriching design information, and automating information validation and transformation tasks. Contemporary design information, however, is mainly intended for human consumption, and needs to be explicitly enriched with the currently missing data and interfaces. In practice, this may require acknowledging the role of technical information or knowledge engineer, to lead the development of the semantic design information process in a design organization. There is also a trade-off between machine-readability and system complexity that needs to be studied further, both empirically and in theory. Research limitations/implications: The conceptualization of the semantic process is essentially an abstraction based on the idea of progressive design. While this effectively allows implementing semantic processes with, e.g., pipeline technologies, the abstraction is valid only when technical design is organized into reasonably distinct tasks. Practical implications: Our work points out a best practice for technical information management in progressive design that can be applied on different levels. Social implications: Current design processes may be somewhat impaired by legacy practices that do not promote information reuse and collaboration beyond conventional task domains. Our work provides a reference model to analyze and develop design activities as formalized work-flows. This work should lead into improved industry design process models and novel CAD/CAM/PDM applications, thereby strengthening industry design processes. Originality/value: While extensively studied, semantic modeling in technical design has been largely dominated by the idea of capturing design artifacts without a clear rationale why this is done and what level of detail should be favored in models. In the semantic process presented in this article, the utility and the chief quality criteria of semantic models (of technical information and artifacts) are explicitly established by the semantic processing pipeline(s). This constructively explains the significance of semantic models as communication and information requirement interfaces, with concrete use cases.

\"The highly competitive and globalized software market is creating pressure on software companies. Given the current boundary conditions, it is critical to continuously increase time-to-market and reduce development costs. In parallel, driven by private life experiences with mobile computing devices, the World Wide Web and software-based services, people, general expectations with regards to software are growing. They expect software that is simple and joyful to use. In the light of the changes that have taken place in recent years, software companies need to fundamentally reconsider the way they develop and deliver software to their customers. This book introduces fundamentals, trends and best practices in the software industry from a threefold perspective which equally takes into account design, management, and development of software. It demonstrates how cross-functional integration can be leveraged by software companies to successfully build software for people. Professionals from business and academia give an overview on state-of-the-art knowledge and report on key insights from their real-life experience. They provide guidance and hands-on recommendation on how to create winning products. This combined perspective fosters the transfer of knowledge between research and practice and offers a high practical value for both sides. The book targets both, practitioners and academics looking for successfully building software in the future. It is directed at Managing Directors of software companies, Software Project Managers, Product Managers and Designers, Software Developers as well as academics and students in the area of Software and Information Systems Engineering, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and Innovation Management\"--Provided by publisher.

This paper presents a model describing sequential iteration, one of the fundamental solution processes experienced in complex engineering design projects. The model is based upon the design structure matrix representation and assumes that each individual design activity is of deterministic duration with probabilistic repetition, where the repeat probabilities are defined by the strength of the task coupling. Using the model, we are able to compute the expected duration of the iterative solution process, and to suggest an initial ordering of the coupled design tasks to minimize the expected duration. We conclude the paper with a discussion of limitations and several extensions to the sequential iteration model.

\"This book explores the impact of design science and design thinking on tourism planning, gathering contributions from leading authorities in the field of tourism research and providing a comprehensive and interconnected panorama of cutting-edge results that influence the current and future design of tourist destinations.\"--Back cover.

The growth of the global service economy has led to a dramatic increase in our daily interactions with highly specialized service systems. Service (or value-cocreation) interactions are both frequent and diverse, and may include retail, financial, healthcare, education, on-line, communications, technical support, entertainment, transportation, legal, professional, government, or many other types of specialized interactions. And yet surprisingly few students graduating from universities have studied anything about service or service systems. Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Design (SSMED), or service science for short, is an emerging discipline aimed at understanding service and innovating service systems. This article sketches an outline and provides an extensive, yet preliminary, set of references to provoke discussions about the interdisciplinary nature of SSMED. One difficult challenge remaining is to integrate multiple disciplines to create a new and unique service science.