Discontinuities in representation processes: The case of architectural design

The strategies proposed to improve the efficiency of the management of public or private organizations are often based on the myth of optimizing the quantity and quality of a decision-maker's information in order to make him/her capable of making rational choices. But the transmission of information to the decision-maker involves the interface of different communication tools, the mental construction of his or her understanding of this information is subjective and, despite his or her good intentions, the decisions he or she makes are partly rational. The concepts of systems thinking are useful because they integrate the inevitable discontinuities and uncertainties back into the representation processes mobilized in all areas of human activity. More precisely, we propose to make these limits explicit through the heuristic modeling of an architectural project designer confronted with his cognitive limits and the limitations of the representation processes