I am a strong proponent of taking into account past examples and history in design, although for me it’s more intuitive than formal.

My current approach involves examining the material qualities of urban infrastructural interfaces and what they manifest in terms of organizational and political decisions — which leads me to the French postal service at the time of their boom circa 1880, and to pneumatic tube systems in major cities in Europe, the US, Australia and South America from 1856 to 1953 or so. (To think there was a time that a metropolis could not imagine modernity without a tube system to quickly ferry paper from one point to another.) The whole “it’s a series of tubes” parallel is too obvious, but the insights for designers of systems that somehow have a physical point of presence are quite useful.