Banathy

Abstract

Bela H. Banathy has a philosophical and idealistic bent. In our new information age, he envisages a culture in which people use design technology to benefit themselves, their societies and their ecology. He pulls together multiple strands of design wisdom, methodology, and practical experience and enlivens them with his fervor for ethics, transcendence, and design culture.

Banathy expresses outrage over the way that institutions, such as science and education, stunt human potential because of their adherence to a mechanistic operational paradigm. He documents how this mechanistic paradigm fails the human spirit and shortchanges the future. Being very much in the tradition of Churchman’s “hero,” he is an apostle of the systems vision. He asks the evolutionary research community: “Is the improvement of the human condition OUR field? Is the issue of human betterment our business?” (1993b, p. 17). His answer is YES.

In Designing Social Systems in a Changing World (1996), Banathy presents a compendium of four decades of research into systems design. He presents an in-depth knowledge base of design and related fields, and encourages his readers to generate their own personalized theories of design. He demonstrates how mechanistic systems are destructive in our information age. He urges a design culture in which people use design technology to replace dysfunctional structures with systems that enable fulfilled living.

Along the way, because of the encyclopedic character of this book, Banathy presents the theories, insights, and phrases of the giants of systems theory. He gathers decades of research into one volume and recapitulates the progress that has been made in systems design during the past 40 years.

The following discussion of Banathy’s work deals with (a) the new world of organizational culture, (b) the idea of design, (c) the process of idealized design,the subordinate processes of (d) transcending the existing system and (e) imaging the new system. In addition, he summarizes philosophical reflections on the nature of systems thinking. He also shows the need for a design culture.