The production process as a complex, dynamic and ordered world

A crucial problem during the product development process (PDP) is how to avoid the combinatorial explosion of alternatives, which are unceasingly generated and tested. Indeed search activities become complex as exploratory activity unfolds in multiple search spaces: design parameters, engineering characteristics, and product properties. In this paper a theoretical framework is proposed on the basis of the morphogenetic approach for analysing the PDP as dynamic mappings between different spaces and sub-spaces. Changing networks of interdependencies are at the center of evolving product complexity and organizational structures. Two fundamental principles, such as compositionality and recursiveness, are suggested in order to explain how complexity and order are unceasingly generated and absorbed in combinatorial spaces.