Egon Ostrosi (maître de conférence à l'Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté et associé à l'équipe Conception, Système d'Information et Processus inventifs de l'unité de recherche ICube) soutiendra son habilitation à diriger des recherches, intitulée Design Cognition, Modelling and Computing, le lundi 29 novembre 2021 à 14h, amphithéâtre de Dietrich.

Le jury est composé  :

• du garant Denis Cavallucci, professeur, INSA Strasbourg
• des rapporteurs :
  • Nabil Anwer, professeur, ENS Paris-Saclay
  • Jean-François Boujut, professeur, Grenoble INP
• des examinateurs :
  • Alain Bernard, professeur, Ecole Centrale de Nantes
  • Mauricio Camargo, professeur, Université de Lorraine
  • Shuichi Fukuda, professeur, Keio University
  • Yves Rémond, professeur, Université de Strasbourg

ABSTRACT

In his pioneering work, The Sciences of the Artificial, (Simon, 1969), Herbert Simon was the first to make a formal distinction between the natural sciences, which are interested in “how things work”, and the design sciences, which are concerned with “how things ought to be”. Design science can be understood as a system of logically-related concepts, which encompasses all knowledge about and for designing. For this reason, it is expected that design science should be able to categorize and arrange all the elements of explored knowledge, and should continue to acquire design-related knowledge, in order to further the search for all forms of truth. It should seek to understand design and, ultimately, to explain the act of designing. This means that design science involves a search for order, which appears not only in the arrangement of knowledge but also in the methods of its research.

Within this context, we defined three design research goals, which we investigated concurrently.

The first goal of this study was to increase our understanding of the phenomena of design in all its complexities. We assume that design is a complex morphodynamic phenomenon, characterized by structural stability and that consequently, designing and design objects are structures that have a degree of stability.

This study’s second goal is to build new design knowledge structures, rather than merely systematically describing its empirical rules. We assume that design knowledge is inherently multifaceted, having both formal scientific knowledge and tacit human knowledge as its sources.

The third goal is to develop formal models – followed by theories, methods and tools – which will improve the existing state-of-the-art in design and which will produce results. Designing and design are spatiotemporal objects and, as such, suggest the concept of a model. Given this point of view, designing and design, can be seen as systems in evolution, and therefore represent a formalizable process.

In order to achieve these goals, our research employs three complementary paradigms: (i) the empirical paradigm (ii) the axiomatic paradigm (or method) and (iii) the artificial intelligence (AI) paradigm. We postulate that applying these three paradigms will yield a deeper understanding of design phenomenon and that the results of this application will yield three, interrelated design research areas that will feed into one another: (i) design cognition, (ii) design modelling (comprising product design, design processes and manufacturing structures) and (iii) design computing.