Understanding by Design – the synthetic approach to intelligence

Designing and building systems for selected abilities is a core activity of research in artificial intelligence. One of the attractive points of proceeding in this manner is that we not only end up with an actual system, but along the way, we learn a lot about the phenomenon of study, e.g. spontaneous structure formation or rapid locomotion. One of the crucial questions concerns the level at which the system should be designed. In this paper, we introduce the synthetic approach to intelligence. This approach promotes design and devel-opment as a research methodology. But in contrast to classical engineering, “Understanding by Design” promotes a bottom-up design stance based on “design for emergence”. These ideas are illustrated with a number of case studies from robotics and human-computer interaction. Conceptual Background and Motivation “Understanding by Design ” is the name of a particular research methodology that is increasingly employed in dif-ferent kinds of sciences. This methodology forms the main foundation of embodied AI whose research and design concepts are summarized in the text book «Understanding Intelligence » (Pfeifer and Scheier 1999, 2001) and in th