Design at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management

Research at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM) of Delft University of Technology focuses on large scale socio-technical systems, such as infrastructures for transport, energy and telecommunication. These systems are not designed and then constructed according to plan, but develop over a long period of time as the result of countless changes. Nonetheless, most of these changes have been purposefully designed. The characterization of three types of design—system design, decision process design, and institutional design—put forward in this paper is meant to sketch with a broad brush the variety of design problems that must be addressed in the context of sociotechnical system development. This will hopefully give the reader a fair idea of design as it is professed at TPM.