D-MES: Conceptualizing the Working Designers

Domain-independent design theories grounded on formal frameworks are of interest for a wide spectrum of professional and academic fields, including design education, design management and innovation strategy. While much attention has been paid to the modeling of the specification process of an artifact, less attention has been paid to the modeling of the creative social interactions involved in the process of designing. There is still a need for conceptual approaches that could further integrate the creative, collective, cognitive and emotional aspects of design. This paper aims to develop such an integrative view by relying on the Memory Evolutive Systems (MES) (A. C. Ehresmann and Vanbremeersch 2007). Based on a conceptual mathematical domain named "Category Theory," MES provide a relational approach for studying evolutionary, multi-scale, multi-temporality and self-organized systems. Using the MES approach, we develop a conceptual framework which encompasses the various phases of a design process and considers how it is directed by the multiple mental and social interactions between different actors. Our approach, named D-MES, extends prior research by providing a formal account of how various entities can operate in parallel to develop creative combinations of new shared objects and processes of different levels of complexity throughout the design process. An illustration is provided in the case of garden design.