The Development of Science-Based Products : Managing by Design Spaces

The design of science-based products (SBP) combines three main issues: exploring a functional space, producing scientific knowledge about key phenomena related to the concept and ensuring manageability of the project. Literature on the subject generally considers the three issues to be irreconcilable, on the grounds that a project involving functional exploration and phenomenological exploration is unmanageable. However, based on two SBP cases, we show that this apparent unmanageability is mainly a result of the lack of a relevant managerial model for the interpretation of the observations. We introduce the notion of 'design space' as a collective working place where designers can act to learn about what they want to learn (for their overall design process). We show that the design of an SBP is managed as a sequence of design spaces