Therefore we need a criterion for judging whether the assembly process of a system is governed by a design. Such a criterion can be found in the set of the systemic roles that are realized by the components of the system: The assembly can be regarded as the result of design only if the actual roles of the components are derived from a design and therefore may count as functions. In this respect, we can say quite clearly that many technical artifacts assume roles in societies that were never laid down in any design. Let me consider the new Airbus A380 as an example of the influence of artifact design on the design of society. It was designed to transport large numbers of people on a limited number of fixed routes. Availability of airport facilities, airline policies, and the preferences of prospective passengers will or will not result in the realization of this intended function; but in any case, designing the A380 has contributed to the design of societies. It opens not only new possibilities of mass transportation but provides jobs, induces activities in building larger runways, requires intervention into nature in order to build these runways, raises social opposition against these interventions and against taking long term risks with respect to environmental issues and to possible human and technical errors and perhaps against the influences of this kind of mass transportation on everyday life, etc. But the role of the A380 in society as it will be realized after delivery of a number of units is not yet known and cannot be planned completely. Designing such an artifact co-designs society, but does not necessarily end up with the intended result. Not roles of artifacts, but only the material components may be directly designed. The same holds for the design of institutions. Therefore, actual roles may not be conceived as functions of an artifact, which would require that they are determined by a design. But no instance can be singled out that fixes the roles that actually show up; there are important interactions in societies that are not designed.
Social Systems Design (SSD) nevertheless tries to determine a social system exactly on the level of such interactions and mutual relationships between components, and to institutionalize all acceptable interactions within the system. This seems only to work in small systems of cooperative individuals, e.g., in educational systems in a benevolent environment, where, in addition, the number of involved artifacts is very limited and interactions are almost completely social (e.g., Banathy, 1998). With systems that have a strong material basis it also seems to work in cases where the technical component of an organization can be factored out for other reasons so that the isolated “soft system” can be addressed (e.g., Checkland, 1981); SSD does not seem to work with respect to large systems such as whole societies (Laszlo, 2001). One of the reasons is the unpredictability of material agency. Pickering states that “[n]o one knows in advance the shape of future machines and what they will do” (Pickering, 1995, 15). Pickering’s statement must be interpreted in the wide sense, which includes that one even can hardly know what present machines will do in the future. We may say that the less strictly an assembly of a component-wise type-fixed entity is determined by a design, the more incomplete is the design. Social systems, even in cases where their components are type-fixed, are thus less completely designed the more they are shaped by processes of selforganization as long as these processes are not already taken into account in the design.
“Design”, in the case of societies, obviously does not refer to a single and coherent plan that rigidly determines the system, but merely to an inhomogeneous set of possibly isolated design elements. There are type-fixed components -among them artifacts, like cars, computers, and buildings. These artifacts assume certain roles in societies. Humans are also components, serving roles as family members, as professionals and as volunteers for different tasks. As in the case of socio-technical systems, we have to take into account many but not all of the places that humans occupy as places for individuals as components of the society. The places themselves are partly fixing the type of their occupants, which here means their profession. This type fixation contributes to the design of a society. Governments and administrations are type-fixed by their constitutions, as is the interaction with and among them using more or less rigid official channels. This list could be expanded almost without limits, but as many components as we might wish to add to this list, we will never end up with an account of a design that determines society to a degree comparable to the determination of a technical artifact or a socio-technical system by its particular design. There are at least four major differences:
1. The design of a society will always be incomplete. Not all components of the
social system will be type-fixed and presumably only a small fraction of them is.
Humans do not only exert type-fixed positions (instead, they will engage in
numerous different self-imposed tasks), nor are all their acts institutionalized (they will interact as well according to free and deliberate, though bounded, choice). And nothing else would be compatible with human freedom.
2. The type fixation that can be found in society will be a highly dispersed patchwork: the designs of related components of a society may originate from completely different sources and may be realized independently rather than in a coordinated way.
3. These pieces of design are subject to continuous change, which again may be uncoordinated: in newly designed socio-technical systems, which form components of the society, machines may be used for functions they were never designed for. In the case of type-fixing positions, the individuals who exert these positions may modify the type fixation and by this mediate a deviation of the society from its previous design.
4. Societies are, to a high degree, self-organizing instead of assembled according to a plan and may be dependent largely on contingent side-conditions. Therefore, the actual role of a type-fixed technical artifact will often deviate from what its function would be according to any design of a system it belongs to.
I have introduced a non-intentional concept of design that is defined in terms of type fixation. A designed entity is a complex entity that is type-fixed componentwise. This allows for a unified view on the design of technical artifacts, biological organisms, socio-technical systems, and, in part, societies (as well as of ecosystems, which I did not take into consideration here). Technical artifacts may be used as type-fixed components of designed socio-technical systems. Therefore, the design of a technical artifact, being its component-wise type fixation, contributes to the design of these systems. But technical artifacts are also components of social systems on the even higher level of societies. They may belong directly to a society as their immediate components, or indirectly as components of socio-technical systems. Therefore, artifact design influences the design - the type fixation of the components - of a society. However, societies are to a large extent self-organizing systems. In a self-organizing system, the design of the components determines the system only to a minor degree. It rather opens up possible outcomes of the selforganization process. Therefore, the type-fixed components of a society may contribute to its design, but the design of a society will only be a piecemeal and incomplete design.110
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That society is based on a piecemeal design, of course, does not mean that “piecemeal social engineering”, which is restrained to ad hoc-reactions on emerging problems that are conceived as being more or less isolated (Popper, 1971), is the desirable method of social reform.