It doesn't cost much to build a skyscraper: knowledge and skills are enough. The idea of such a building, which can be implemented in any climatic conditions with possible tectonic movements of the earth's crust, is worth a lot: knowledge and skills will obviously not be enough under these (only two!), but fundamentally significant, conditions.
It is doubtful that a person would dare to conceptualize such an idea. There are unique technical solutions that various specialists in different countries of the world have implemented in buildings, bridges, telecommunications facilities and other complex structures. All this is in demand in a specific place for a specific purpose and is designed for specific conditions of use.
Statics and dynamics of systems
Modern conceptual design is static. The conditions for applying the results of human intellectual activity are always dynamics. Human intellectual activity itself iscontinuous development (dynamics).
Today the level of science, technology and knowledge is too low to create dynamic systems. If a person designs an airplane: it is at least an engine and two wings. If he creates a prestigious car, then the car will have a leather interior and four wheels. Submarines, fighters and spaceships are not to be mentioned at all: inertia and rigid construction make them vulnerable to any dynamic, not necessarily "intelligent" projectile.
Each new technical system is better than the previous one. It absorbs the experience of creating predecessors, levels out the mistakes and miscalculations made earlier. People are accustomed to put up with the static results of human intellectual activity: there is no other way out. It is no longer accepted to make miscalculations in the conceptual design of new technical, social and other systems.
Any design is a spiral dynamic process that adaptively takes into account previous knowledge and skills, determines changes in the application area and focuses on reasonable customer requirements.
Collecting and analyzing information
Not only a person, but any living creature observes and collects information. Consciously or subconsciously, it doesn't matter. Only as a result of analyzing the perceived data and “understanding” them through the prism of accumulated experience (knowledge and skills), the situation is analyzed and a decision is made.
Man has developed many methods and tools for collecting and analyzing information, butit is meaningless to single out this process as a stage, for example, data preparation or preliminary design. A person consciously perceives information and makes decisions, considering current goals and objectives. A person subconsciously performs much more actions and, ultimately, it is the subconscious mind that pushes the consciousness to form the correct behavior and perform a specific action.
The collection and analysis of information is the beginning of a social or technical system. This in itself is the concept of getting started. Primary information is always collected and studied in the context of the goal and tasks to be solved. Always secondary information reflects all the same goals and objectives. Each new stage is a conceptual design at a new stage in the development of knowledge about what has been achieved and what is being achieved: about the goal and the tasks to be solved.
Static and rigid construction
A person does not always attach objective significance to his activities. It's not at all that he does not strive for this, it's just that he often sets some goals for himself, but achieves others. Conceptual design has always existed, but “consciously” a person reacted to this only with the advent of computer technology and programming.
Meanwhile, the association: "concept=information system" does not exist. In any case: the current state of affairs testifies to this.
A simple example. The organization's electronic document management system. How many years have such systems been created? How many such systems have been developed?How many scientific conferences - took place, copies - broken, papers - scribbled? To this day, none of the results of the "conceptual design" of document management systems has taken place as a conceptually executed.
Rigid constructions of syntax and semantics of programming languages. A clear understanding that a person cannot formalize the dynamics of the field of application and the task being solved: knowledge and skills are clearly not enough. Result: any formalization model of the scope and the required task turns into a static construction.
The modern world of virtual technologies is not much different from the pyramid of Cheops. It is extremely difficult to change anything in the created information system. Any change is fraught with significant costs of third-party labor (developer, programmer, author): the information system itself “cannot do anything for itself.”
Objective laws of the physical world
Natural conceptual design, as an example of creating an ideal system, has always existed. There is a difference between what a person does and what he understands. The Pyramid of Cheops is not alone in its performance. Almost a kilometer of "graceful" reinforced concrete structures: the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai (UAE) is not the only high-rise building. There are many similar examples: natural conceptual design is inherent in man, and man demonstrates this in parallel in various regions of the planet in various areas of social, industrial and spiritual practice.
Any painting of an icon in a temple, made on a spherical surface, but perceived in volume and, of course, from any place in this temple, was created many times by different specialists at different times.
The theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ), one of the notable achievements of the last century, was carried out by one person, but attracted the attention of numerous specialists who developed and used it in real practice.
TRIZ is an ideal example of modern conceptual design, started by one person and developed by many people, but has not reached the objectively possible conceptual level of development.
TRIZ is a notable but not monumental achievement. Altshuller, Shapiro and thousands of their followers contributed to theory, practice and inventive work, but the result is "insignificant": followers and copyright holders, fantastic stories and articles about strong thinking … in comparison: Leonardo Da Vinci with his research on bird flight and a radically new idea: “the wing should not flap, but the airplane should fly” - he became more famous and decorated his numerous conceptual inventions with the mysterious Jaconda.
Subjective provisions of the social world
TRIZ was not built on the foundation of the terms of reference, and its ancestor Altshuller was not guided by any methods of performing work. The "masters" of the theory of inventive problem solving and thousands of their students were content with little:
- allartificial systems develop according to certain laws;
- all systems develop overcoming contradictions;
- for the same contradictions, the solutions to problems can be very different.
From the point of view of public consciousness, relevance and usefulness, the target setting of TRIZ is socially significant and has real practical application.
Automate the process of solving inventive problems, excluding from it “elements of chance: sudden and unpredictable insight, blind enumeration and rejection of options, dependence on mood, etc. n” (quote from Wikipedia).
TRIZ has significantly influenced the public consciousness and allowed many thousands of specialists to solve real practical problems. Many laboratories of inventing machines were created and several dozen intelligent systems were designed.
However, the theory of solving inventive problems to this day is no different from the course of a secondary or higher school, but is much less organized methodologically. All three basic postulates of the TRIZ concept have absolutely no meaning. The public consciousness still has no idea about any "inventing machine", and the idea of artificial intelligence and the possibility of creating an intelligent system have not been taken seriously for a long time.
To designate - does not mean to use: conceptually about the basic postulates of TRIZ
Postulate "1": there is no difference between natural and artificial system, therefore. like that andthe other develops not according to definite, but according to objective laws. The fact that a person has not known or does not understand the objectivity of the laws of Nature means absolutely nothing for these laws.
Postulate "2": all systems develop, but where are the contradictions. There is a task, there is a need for its conceptual design, and there is a problem of education (qualification) of specialists involved in its solution.
Postulate "3": even from scratch, which two qualified specialists found in search of one contradiction, they will formulate two dozen radically different solutions.
So it was, is and will be, as long as the level of knowledge and skills will be based on subjective opinion, and not on the objective laws of Nature.
Design goals and objectives are always important, but their concept is much more important. In any field of application, a developing natural system or a man-made artificial system is something, denoted by a goal, and a spectrum of components of this something, denoted by tasks. There are requirements that are formulated by the consumer (customer), the author of the idea.
Conceptual design (CP) is the dynamics of the development of the goal and its constituent tasks, as a way of moving towards understanding the essence of things, phenomena and processes. A person first understands what needs to be done, then does something and, rethinking what has been created, reconsiders the goal and its constituent tasks.
Methods and design tools
An interesting feature of search results on request:"methods and tools of conceptual design": 97% of the results are related to information systems, programming, databases and other areas in the field of computer science and information technology; the remaining 3% will go to "more practical" areas of social and production needs: aircraft engines, manufacturing processes, social or environmental projects, and more.
A strange feature of the human mentality, when it acquires knowledge and approaches the understanding of the objective laws of Nature: to put one's own achievements in the first place, neglect the achievements of other people and consider only one's own experience as the determining criterion for understanding the environment and influencing it.
Conceptual Design: Examples from Software Engineering.
1) Currently, it is customary to distinguish the following software development methodologies:
- Structural approach based on the principle of algorithmic de-composition.
- An object-oriented approach that uses object decomposition.
2) The main stages of the CP are:
- Pre-design.
- Draft (working or techno-working) design.
- Production, testing and development of a prototype system.
3) There are two approaches to CP:
- The first approach involves the formulation, definition and integration of high-level objects used to build the model. Mainattention is paid to the integration of concepts (concepts) representing objects.
- The second approach is entity modeling. Modeling and integrating user views in terms of entity diagrams.
Other definitions of methods, tools, interpretation of goals and objectives in the modern public consciousness are reflected in a similar style.
Objective design approach
It is difficult to agree with the authors of various conceptual theories, methods and tools for performing conceptual design. Firstly, computer science is not the most important thing in the social and industrial sphere, although it is of great importance. Secondly, the idea of formalization is a guarantee of statics and rigid constructions in solving absolutely any problem. Thirdly, with all the proper and respectful attitude to the knowledge and skills of recognized authorities and specialists, priority is given not to their knowledge and skills, but to the objective laws of nature.
Science and practice are obliged to the theory of inventive problem solving. It was really a great thing: to systematize physical, chemical, social and other achievements, practical solutions, inventions, technological processes. The task of formulating systems of physical effects or determining objective patterns is truly relevant, it has always been, and in the modern world its relevance is growing rapidly.
Objective design approach: nothing rigid and formal, all processes and concepts are developed, continuously reviewed, analyzed and improved. Talk aboutconceptual design in a formal way is impossible. To fix meaning in terms of relational or hierarchical relationships between objects or phenomena means to fix the end result.
The point is not what the goal, task, means or method is. In a conceptual context, the meaning is important, not its formal designation.
Man and bee
The mentality of the crown of Nature - man to this day does not allow him to endow another living being with intelligence. Man still does not understand that his own opinion means absolutely nothing for the objective laws of Nature.
A person may think that he is acting consciously and not understand that his brain is constantly doing something unconsciously, so that after three years after birth, a child begins, for example, to express his needs in words, and by the age of five to build pyramids from blocks, and by the age of ten dream of flying to the moon or the status of a famous composer.
The bee does the conceptual design of its behavior automatically. The result is a benefit to the bee family, the environment and humans. Let a person believe that a bee does not have intelligence. It means absolutely nothing.
Conceptual design of their behavior makes each person better than a bee: he has much more functional and intellectual capabilities. It is not necessary to be a great architect, designer of fifth generation fighters. It is enough to be a simple teacher of a secondary school and without knowledge of TRIZ, on onebreath to create the concept of preparing children for a complex and interesting life in society. For the benefit of yourself and others.
