Although many excellent papers and some specialised monographs on different aspects of design theory had been published, prior to 1985 (when the first edition of this book appeared) there was no comprehensive monograph on the field. Thus it was our plan to cover the main concepts and ideas of modern design theory without being encyclopedic, but including a deeper study of several representative topics. As it turned out, these aims (which required a rather long book) seem to have been met by the first edition which has been quoted extensively in the research literature.

A first draft of this book was obtained by merging different manuscripts of the authors. The first edition then grew from an iterative process of rewriting in which all the authors contributed their ideas to each of the parts. For reasons of time constraints and shifting research interests, the major part of the revision now presented has been done by the second author, drawing on his previous update Jungnickel (1989a) and surveys Jungnickel (1990a, 1992a); in particular, this holds for Chapter VI. Of course, there has still been considerable help from his co-authors (with Chapter XIII being the first author's contribution), but nevertheless he is willing to accept most of the blame for the mistakes introduced during the process of revision.