By Nigel Cross,

"There has been a growing acceptance of design on its own terms, a growing acknowledgement and articulation of design as a discipline. We have realised that we do not have to turn design into an imitation of science; neither do we have to treat design as a mysterious, ineffable art. We recognize that design has its own distinct intellectual culture."

Abstract

There has been a long history of concern to develop a scientific approach to design. This paper unravels some of these concerns, and develops the view of 'design as a discipline', based upon a 'science of design', not a 'design science'. The underlying axiom of this discipline is that there are forms of knowledge special to the competencies and abilities of a designer. Design as a discipline needs to develop its intellectual independence, whilst seeking to emulate other disciplines in standards of rigour in scholarship and research.

Design and Science

A desire to 'scientise' design can be traced back to the 20th-Century Modern Movement in design. Protagonists for the movement espoused a desire to produce works of art and design based on objectivity and rationality, that is, on the values of science. These aspirations to scientise design surfaced strongly again in the 'design methods movement' of the 1960s. The desire of this new movement was, perhaps even more strongly than before, to base the process of design (as well as the products of design) on objectivity and rationality. The origins of this emergence of new design methods in the 1960s lay in the application of novel scientific and computational methods to the novel and pressing problems of the 2nd World War - from which came civilian developments such as operational research and management decision-making techniques.

The 'Conference on Design Methods', held in London in 1962 (Jones and Thornley, 1963), is generally regarded as the event which marked the launch of the design methods movement and design methodology as a subject or field of enquiry. A second conference, on 'The Design Method', held in Birmingham in 1965 (Gregory, 1966a), tried to relate 'the design method' to 'the scientific method' and began specifically to refer to 'design science'. (The term was also being used by Buckminster Fuller, but with different intentions.) In the final paper in 'The Design Method' proceedings, Gregory (1966b) sought to promote this concept of 'design science'. Gregory's definition was: 'Design science is concerned with the study, investigation and accumulation of knowledge about the design process and its constituent operations. It aims to collect, organize and improve those aspects of thought and information which are available concerning design, and to specify and carry out research in those areas of design which are likely to be of value to practical designers and design organizations' (Gregory, 1996: 323).

From this perspective, the decade culminated with Herbert Simon's outline of 'the sciences of the artificial' and his specific plea for the development of 'a science of design' in the universities: 'a body of intellectually tough, analytic, partly formalizable, partly empirical, teachable doctrine about the design process' (Simon, 1969: 58). This is probably not unlike what Gregory had in mind, and thus the terms 'design science' and 'science of design' became confused, sometimes being used interchangeably.

But others also had the development of a 'design science' as their aim. For example, Hansen (1974, quoted by Hubka and Eder, 1987) stated the aim of design science as being 'to recognize laws of design and its activities, and develop rules'. This would seem to be a design science constituted as 'systematic design' - the procedures of designing organized in a systematic way. Hubka and Eder were originators of the Workshop Design Konstruction (WDK) and a major, continuing series of international conferences on engineering design (ICED), and also formed 'The International Society for Design Science'. They regarded Hansen's definition as a narrower interpretation of design science than their own: 'Design science comprises a collection (a system) of logically connected knowledge in the area of design, and contains concepts of technical information and of design methodology... Design science addresses the problem of determining and categorizing all regular phenomena of the systems to be designed, and of the design process. Design science is also concerned with deriving from the applied knowledge of the natural sciences appropriate information in a form suitable for the designer's use' (Hubka and Eder, 1987: 124). This definition includes systematic knowledge of both the scientific/technical underpinnings of the design of artefacts and of design process and methodology.

The Design Research Society's 1980 conference on 'Design:Science:Method' (Jacques and Powell, 1981) gave an opportunity to air many considerations on the relationships between design and science. The general feeling emerging from that conference was that it was time to move on from making simplistic comparisons and/or parallels between science and design; that perhaps there was not so much for design to learn from science after all, and that perhaps science rather had something to learn from design. Cross, Naughton and Walker (1981) claimed that the epistemology of science was in disarray and therefore had little to offer an epistemology of design. Glynn (1985) later suggested that 'it is the epistemology of design that has inherited the task of developing the logic of creativity, hypothesis innovation or invention that has proved so elusive to the philosophers of science' (Glynn, 1985: 126).

One view of the design-science relationship is that, through the reliance of modern design upon scientific knowledge, through the application of scientific knowledge in practical tasks, design 'makes science visible' (Willem, 1990). Eekels and Roozenburg (1991) made a detailed comparison of scientific research with perhaps the most science-based domain of design - engineering design. They refuted the 'misunderstanding' that engineering design might be regarded as a kind of scientific research, and concluded that 'many of the differences are fundamental in character. As design may be considered the core of engineering, and research the core of science, these differences should guard us from identifying engineering design with scientific research, or even engineering with science' (Eekels and Roozenburg (1991; 203). Roozenburg (1992) also went on to contribute to the elusive logic of creativity with his paper 'On the logic of innovative design'.

Despite these investigations and clarifications of the design-science relationship (see also de Vries, Cross and Grant, 1993), there remains some confusion. I would like especially to try to clarify the two terms: a design science, and a science of design.

I would suggest that design science implies an explicitly organised, rational and wholly systematic approach to design; not just the utilisation of scientific knowledge of artefacts, but design in some sense a scientific activity itself. This is a controversial concept, challenged by many designers and design theorists. As Grant (1979: 46) wrote: 'Most opinion among design methodologists and among designers holds that the act of designing itself is not and will not ever be a scientific activity; that is, that designing is itself a non-scientific or a-scientific activity.'

However, Grant also made it clear that 'the study of designing may be a scientific activity; that is, design as an activity may be the subject of scientific investigation' Grant (1979: 46). This is the concept of a science of design, for example as stated by Gasparski and Strzalecki (1990: 1186): 'The science of design (should be) understood, just like the science of science, as a federation of subdisciplines having design as the subject of their cognitive interests.' In this view, therefore, the science of design is the study of design - something similar to what I have elsewhere defined design methodology to be; the study of the principles, practices and procedures of design (Cross, 1984).

So I would suggest that science of design refers to that body of work which attempts to improve our understanding of design through 'scientific' (i.e., systematic, reliable) methods of investigation. Let us be clear that a 'science of design' is not the same as a 'design science'. The study of design leaves open the interpretation of the nature of design.

Design as a Discipline

By Design as a Discipline, I mean design studied on its own terms, within its own rigorous culture. I mean a 'science of design' based on the 'reflective practice' of design.

Donald Schšn (1983) explicitly challenged the positivist doctrine underlying much of the 'design science' movement, and offered instead a constructivist paradigm. He criticised Simon's 'science of design' for being based on approaches to solving well-formed problems, whereas professional practice throughout design and technology and elsewhere has to face and deal with 'messy, problematic situations'. Instead of the positivist approach, Schšn (1983: 49) proposed to search for 'an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty, instabilty, uniqueness, and value conflict,' which he found in 'reflective practice'. Schšn appeared to be more prepared than his positivist predecessors to put trust in the abilities displayed by competent practitioners, and to try to explicate those competencies rather than to supplant them. This approach has been developed particularly in a series of conferences and publications throughout the 1990s focused on 'research in design thinking': Cross, Dorst and Roozenburg (1992), Cross, Christiaans and Dorst (1996), Akin (1997), Goldschmidt and Porter (1999).

Despite the positivist, technical-rationality basis of The Sciences of the Artificial, Simon did propose that 'the science of design' could form a fundamental, common ground of intellectual endeavour and communication across the arts, sciences and technology. He suggested that the study of design could be an interdisciplinary study accessible to all those involved in the creative activity of making the artificial world. For example, 'Few engineers and composers . . . can carry on a mutually rewarding conversation about the content of each other's professional work. What I am suggesting is that they can carry on such a conversation about design, can begin to perceive the common creative activity in which they are both engaged, can begin to share their experiences of the creative, professional design process' (Simon, 1969: 82).

This is the challenge for design research - to construct a way of conversing about design that is at the same time both interdisciplinary and disciplined. It is the paradoxical task of creating an interdisciplinary discipline. This discipline seeks to develop domain-independent approaches to theory and research in design. The underlying axiom of this discipline is that there are forms of knowledge and ways of knowing that are special to the awareness and ability of a designer, and independent of the different professional domains of design practice. Just as the other intellectual cultures in the sciences and the arts concentrate on the underlying forms of knowledge peculiar to the scientist or the artist, so we engaged in the culture of design must concentrate on the 'designerly' ways of knowing, thinking and acting.

Many researchers in the design world have been realising that design does indeed have its own appropriate intellectual culture, and that we must avoid swamping design research with different cultures imported either from the sciences or the arts. This does not mean that we completely ignore these other cultures. On the contrary, they have much stronger histories of enquiry, scholarship and research than we have in design. We need to draw upon, and feed back into, those histories and traditions where appropriate, whilst building our own intellectual culture, acceptable and defensible in the world on its own terms. And we have to be able to demonstrate that standards of rigour in our intellectual culture at least match those of the others.

Design Research

Throughout the field of design research in recent years there has been a growing awareness of the intrinsic strengths and appropriateness of design thinking within its own context, of the validity of a form of 'design intelligence' (Cross, 1999). There has been a growing acceptance of design on its own terms, a growing acknowledgement and articulation of design as a discipline. We have realised that we do not have to turn design into an imitation of science; neither do we have to treat design as a mysterious, ineffable art. We recognize that design has its own distinct intellectual culture.

But there is also some confusion and controversy over the nature of valid design research, particularly in the context of doctoral education. I believe that examples of 'best practice' in research have the following characteristics.

The research is: