Design typology and design organisation

The idea of focusing upon the creation of a design typology was articulated by [Andreasen & Wognum 2000] and detailed by [Andreasen & Wognum 2001]. The aim was to propose a typology, which could serve as identification of design types and design research contributions. For a long period the design research society has recognised normative procedural models of designing as being a reasonable answer to the question: How do designing proceed? The reasoning behind the models, from which the design methodology model by [Pahl & Beitz 1995], may be seen as a characteristic one, was a mix of human problem solving-, design management-, and artefact nature-reasoning. Critique has been raised to that type of models as being neither explanatory nor instructive. If we accept these models as merely being pragmatically "stepping-stone" explanations of what happens during designing, it is interesting to observe, that these models are presented as guidelines for "new to the world"-situations. They do not take into account, that in any normal design situation, the designers have been there before, i.e. they have experiences from similar tasks, knowledge domains, procedures etc. For explaining our approach to the creation of a design typology, we use a metaphoric picture of the design situation: "We design on dirty blackboards". The designer has always reusable patterns, which may be used as support, if we carefully do not wipe the blackboard clean. The false assumption in the current design models is, that the blackboards are clean. By assuming that, we also loose our possibility to explain how designing is possible. The core question concerning our typology is as follows: What is the set of views upon designing, we have to establish for obtaining a sufficient set of explanations? Or: What is the set of different theories or models delivered from research and practice, necessary for explanation?