Foundational Axioms of Dialogic Design Science

The six Foundational Axioms of Dialogic Design Science are:

1. The Complexity Axiom: Social systems designing is a multi-dimensional challenge. It demands that observational variety be respected when engaging observers in dialogue, while making sure that their cognitive limitations are not violated in our effort to strive for comprehensiveness (John N. Warfield).
2. The Engagement Axiom: Designing social systems, such as health care, education, cities, communities, without the authentic engagement of the stakeholders is unethical. It results in inferior plans that are not implementable (Hasan Özbekhan).
3. The Investment Axiom: Stakeholders engaged in designing their own social systems must make personal investments of trust, committed faith, or sincere hope, in order to be effective in discovering shared understanding and collaborative solutions (Tom Flanagan).
4. The Logic Axiom: Appreciation of distinctions and complementarities among inductive, deductive and retroductive logics is essential for a futures-creative understanding of the human being. Retroductive logic makes provision for leaps of imagination as part of value-and emotion-laden inquiries by a variety of stakeholders (Norma Romm, 2001; 2010).
5. The Epistemological Axiom: A comprehensive science of the human being should inquire about human life in its totality of thinking, wanting, telling, and feeling, like the indigenous people and the ancient Athenians were capable of doing. It should not be dominated by the traditional Western epistemology that reduced science to only intellectual dimensions (LaDonna Harris).
6. The Boundary-Spanning Axiom: Stakeholders act beyond borders to design social systems that enable people from all walks of life to bond across cultural and religious barriers and boundaries as part of an enrichment of their repertoires for seeing, feeling and acting (loanna Tsivacou, 1997).