Critical heuristics of social systems design

Health care planning, city and regional planning, energy and transportation planning, environmental design and other areas of social systems design are becoming issues of increasing concern to policy makers. Faced with complex steering problems that may have far-reaching societal implications, they except help from applied disciplines such as Operational Research, systems science, technology assessment, program evaluation, cost-effectiveness analysis, and similar approaches to scientifically informed planning. But these approaches offer little help in critically reflecting on the normative implications of the problem definitions and solution proposals they inspire.Critical Heuristics seeks to provide both the involved planners and affected citizens with a conceptual framework for identifying and discussing the normative implications of problem definitions, systems designs, program evaluations, etc. The paper introduces some key concepts of Critical Heuristics and briefly discusses their significance to ‘rational’ planning.