ABSTRACT
We will take a view of various approaches. There are several reasons for the current attempts to establish methods and theories of design, mostly effective outside the fi elds of conventional design-in systems engineering for example-and one of the problems is the “peaceful application” of these methods. These methods will be termed rational. Here we shall take a very weak concept of “rationality” by saying that a solution is rational if the arguments for its solutions are communicable.1 One of the objections to such rational methods is that they seem to be anti-genius oriented. The belief in genius implies that really important changes or designs are only produced by imaginative persons with certain abilities. We are talking however about the everyday application, and if you look at, for instance, architecture as a design fi eld, then, in fact, more than 95 percent of design is done by persons who are in the non-genius category.2 The infl uence of genius on the environment is very small, but on the profession very great.
