Review: Designerly Ways of Knowing: Design Discipline Versus Design Science[1]
Posted 2014-03-05 - Archived under: design, review - 1 reply
“The natural sciences are concerned with how things are…design on the other hand is concerned with how things ought to be.” – Simon [2]
According to Wikipedia, Nigel Cross “is a British academic, a design researcher and educator, Emeritus Professor of Design Studies at The Open University, United Kingdom, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Design Studies. He is one of the key people of the Design Research Society.” He has worked with computer aided design, and worked with early Wizard-of-Oz-Experiments.
In his article ‘Designerly Ways of Knowing’ he starts to explore what is specific to design knowledge, and what is specific to design compared to other scientific knowledge. This and other articles on similar themes were later (2006) published as a book with the same name.
In the article Cross first explore the likeness and difference between design and other (natural) sciences. He then goes on to describes three different approaches to design within the scientific field.
The attempts to describe design within the scientific fields started in the 1920’s, and took mainly a positivist approach, trying to explain science and put it into a system. Cross write: “throughout much of the modern movement, we see a desire to produce works of art and design based on objectivity and rationality, that is, on the values of science.” But he goes on to say that in the 60’s a counterargument was made about science not being explainable through this approach. As design was dealing with “wicked” problems, with no one simple solution the purely ‘scientific’ approach of dealing with “tame” problems where one best solution can be found is not applicable. In this, at least according to the early approaches, there is a fundamental difference between ‘design’ and ‘science’. As an example he quotes Simon: “The natural sciences are concerned with how things are…design on the other hand is concerned with how things ought to be.”[2] He then goes on to show that this leads to a big difference in approach, where method becomes vital to natural sciences, where it validates result by making them repeatable, something neither vital neither desirable to design.
To deal with this unclear relation between science and design different approaches have been taken, and Cross identifies three, which he calls ‘scientific design’, ‘design science’, and ‘a science of design’.
- Scientific Design “refers to modern, industrialized design […] based on scientific knowledge but utilizing s mix of both intuitive and non intuitive design methods”.
- Design Science “refers to an explicitly organized, rational, and wholly systematic approach to design; not just the utilization of scientific knowledge of artifacts, but design in some sense as a scientific activity itself”.
- A Science of Design means to approach design in itself as a subject of scientific investigation. The science of design is the study of design.
Finally Cross promotes design as, not necessarily a science, but a discipline. He says design as a discipline “can mean design studied on its own terms, and within its own rigorous culture. It can mean a science of design based on the reflective practice of design: design as a discipline, but not design as a science.” He says that “what [designers] especially know how to do is the proposing of additions to and changes to the artificial world. Their knowledge, skills, and values lie in the techniques of the artificial.” (as opposed to Simons[3] title, the science of the artificial)
[1] Nigel Cross, “Designerly Ways of Knowing: Design Discipline Versus Design Science,” Design Issues 17, no. 3 (2001): 49–55, doi:10.1162/074793601750357196.
[2] Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd ed (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996).
[3] Ibid.
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