In a highly interconnected world, the design challenges faced by design professionals,engineers, and individual users are growing increasingly difficult due to multiple
objectives that one must attempt to satisfy across multiple scales. Accordingly, the
effectiveness and fit of a particular design solution is often dependent upon the ability to
balance competing constraints for which there exists no optimal solution. In instances
where user needs and relevant solutions are dynamic, why not attempt to leverage the
knowledge, information, and sharp-end expertise of all of a product’s users distributed
throughout the product system?
In order to facilitate a better understanding of both product systems and the
heterogeneous users who comprise them, this thesis looks to ideas from the diverse and
growing body of complex systems research, and attempts to synthesize an understanding
of complex product systems. In order to design for the complex environments in which
products will be used, we must acknowledge the scale, scope, and complexity of the
design problem, and then look to distributed information regarding users’ needs, goals,
and desires in order to gain a more complete perspective.
By capturing, transferring, and integrating relevant information from multiple contexts
of use, information can be tailored to the current understandings and goals of specific
users. Accordingly, a system of specifically tuned products and information has great
potential to maintain the relevance of both products and information across multiple
iterations and over longer periods of time, all while helping users to more effectively
accomplish dynamic goals and incorporate products into their own local contexts.