1Design Issues, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 49-55, 2001
Designerly Ways of Knowing: Design Discipline versus Design Science
Nigel Cross
This is a revised version of a paper prepared for the Design+Research Symposium held at
the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, May 2000.
Design and Science
I would like to begin this paper with a brief review of some of the historical concerns that
have emerged with respect to a relationship between design and science. These concerns
emerged strongly at two important periods in the modern history of design: in the 1920s, with
a search for scientific design products, and in the 1960s, with a concern for scientific design
process. The 40-year cycle in these concerns appears to be coming around again, and we
might expect to see the re-emergence of design-science concerns in the 2000s.
A desire to ‘scientise’ design can be traced back to ideas in the 20th-Century modern
movement of design. For example, in the early 1920s, the De Stijl protagonist Theo van
Doesburg expressed his perception of a new spirit in art and design: ‘Our epoch is hostile to
every subjective speculation in art, science, technology, etc. The new spirit, which already
governs almost all modern life, is opposed to animal spontaneity, to nature's domination, to
artistic flummery. In order to construct a new object we need a method, that is to say, an
objective system.’[1] A little later, the architect Le Corbusier wrote about the house as an
objectively-designed ‘machine for living’: ‘The use of the house consists of a regular
sequence of definite functions. The regular sequence of these functions is a traffic
phenomenon. To render that traffic exact, economical and rapid is the key effort of modern
architectural science.’[2] In both comments, and 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.
These aspirations to scientise design surfaced strongly again in the ‘design methods
movement’ of the 1960s. The Conference on Design Methods, held in London in September,
1962 [3] is generally regarded as the event which marked the launch of design methodology
as a subject or field of enquiry. The desire of the new movement was even more strongly
than before to base design process (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 operations
research and management decision-making techniques.
The 1960s was heralded as the ‘design science decade’ by the radical technologist
Buckminster Fuller, who called for a ‘design science revolution’, based on science,
technology and rationalism, to overcome the human and environmental problems that he
believed could not be solved by politics and economics[4]. From this perspective, the decade
culminated with Herbert Simon’s outline of ‘the sciences of the artificial’[5] 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.’
However, in the 1970s there emerged a backlash against design methodology and a rejection
of its underlying values, notably by some of the early pioneers of the movement. Christopher
Alexander, who had originated a rational method for architecture and planning [6], now said:
‘I’ve disassociated myself from the field... There is so little in what is called “design

2methods” that has anything useful to say about how to design buildings that I never even read
the literature anymore... I would say forget it, forget the whole thing.’[7] Another leading
pioneer, J. Christopher Jones said: ‘In the 1970s I reacted against design methods. I dislike
the machine language, the behaviourism, the continual attempt to fix the whole of life into a
logical framework.’[8]
To put the quotations of Alexander and Jones into context it may be necessary to recall the
social/cultural climate of the late-1960s - the campus revolutions and radical political
movements, the new liberal humanism and rejection of conservative values. But also it had to
be acknowledged that there had been a lack of success in the application of ‘scientific’
methods to everyday design practice. Fundamental issues were also raised by Rittel and
Webber [9], who characterised design and planning problems as ‘wicked’ problems,
fundamentally un-amenable to the techniques of science and engineering, which dealt with
‘tame’ problems.
Nevertheless, design methodology continued to develop strongly, especially in engineering
and some branches of industrial design. (Although there may still have been very limited
evidence of practical applications and results.) The fruits of this work emerged in a series of
books on engineering design methods and methodology in the 1980s. Just to mention some
English-language ones, these included Tjalve [10], Hubka [11], Pahl and Beitz [12], French
[13], Cross [14], Pugh [15].
Another significant development throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s was the emergence
of new journals of design research, theory and methodology. Just to refer, again, to English-
language publications, these included Design Studies in 1979, Design Issues in 1984,
Research in Engineering Design in 1989, the Journal of Engineering Design and the Journal
of Design Management in 1990, Languages of Design in 1993 and the Design Journal in
1997.
Despite the apparent scientific basis (and bias) of much of their work, design methodologists
also sought from the earliest days to make distinctions between design and science, as
reflected in the following quotations.
‘Scientists try to identify the components of existing structures, designers try to shape
the components of new structures.’ Alexander [6]
‘The scientific method is a pattern of problem-solving behaviour employed in finding
out the nature of what exists, whereas the design method is a pattern of behaviour employed
in inventing things...which do not yet exist. Science is analytic; design is constructive.’
Gregory [16]
‘The natural sciences are concerned with how things are...design on the other hand is
concerned with how things ought to be.’ Simon [5]
There may indeed be a critical distinction to be made: method may be vital to the practice of
science (where it validates the results) but not to the practice of design (where results do not
have to be repeatable, and in most cases must not be repeated, or copied). The Design
Research Society’s 1980 conference on ‘Design:Science:Method’ [17] gave an opportunity to
air many of these considerations. The general feeling from that conference was perhaps that
it was time to move on from making simplistic comparisons and distinctions 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 et al. [18] claimed that
the epistemology of science was, in any case, in disarray, and therefore had litle to offer an
epistemology of design. Glynn [19] 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.’