Aesthetics of Decision - Unfolding the design process within a framework of complexity and self-organization

Complexity-grounded paradigms and self-organization based strategies promise enormous potential when channeled in a design process, but their current stage of development (while delivering groundbreaking results in recent years) hasn't significantly impacted yet the widespread architectural practice. Still, the tendency (in the development of technology and society) is clearly towards an increase in complexity and distributed intelligence, henceforth it is of primary importance to adopt a design approach that allows the harnessing of such potential and convey it in the creation of outcomes that favor a richer and heterogeneous ecological entanglement. To tap this kind of potential in an open-ended process requires a design approach that re-defines the distribution of control, choices and information throughout the whole process (including materials and fabrication processes).The paper explores the possibility of such design approach in the territory that links education and research through a series of Master Thesis developed at the University of Bologna and comparing them to other case studies developed worldwide.