Introduction to Abduction and Technological Design

Abstract

After a brief introduction to some relevant works in the area of abduction and technological design, the four chapters included in this part of the handbook are described. The first chapter looks at modern software-based tools that designers use and examines the extent to which computerized design assistants may exhibit abductive reasoning. The second chapter looks at evaluation activities during design, which have traditionally been carried out by deduction. The author argues that only abductive reasoning can break the constraints imposed by a fixed, predetermined set of evaluation criteria and lead to innovative performance. The next two chapters are more theoretic in nature: The third chapter claims that regular abduction cannot account for innovation and uses concept-knowledge mappings to represent the process of generating new knowledge as a precondition for innovation and creativity. The fourth chapter uses the modern C-K Theory of design, which is capable of accounting for generativity, to study formulations of design abduction, both of the explanatory and innovative types. New facets of design abduction, and also of science, are uncovered using C-K Theory as the framework for analysis.