ABSTRACT
Design and planning decision-making in a “political” context tends to be relatively unsystematic in its use and evaluation of the information provided in the process, as compared for example to various formal evaluation and objectification procedures developed in the design methods literature. This chapter explores the potential connections between a selected set of design process aspects: — argumentation, evaluation, and decision-making — and proposes a procedure for design decision-making in an argumentative context using systematic argument assessment. Formal evaluation procedures have been the subject of considerable work aiming at making the task of evaluation more systematic, explicit, transparent and objectified. The chapter aims at contributing to the development of workable procedures of systematic argument assessment for the decision purposes. Wherever design or planning decisions of some significance must be made and an argumentative/discursive mode for treating the problem is adopted, decision-makers face a procedural gap if they also wish to base their decision on systematic evaluation.
