Design and Research In Artificial and Natural Sciences

Adopted from：http://www.iiis2010.org/wmsci/website/default.asp?vc=36

The Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon affirmed that design is an essential ingredient of the Artificial Sciences and, consequently, a required process in professional activities, especially in Engineering, Architecture, Education and Business.¹ Ranulph Glanville, president of the American Society for cybernetics and expert in design theory, affirms that "Research is a variety of design. So do research as design."² "Design is key to research. Research has to be designed."³ Frayling asserts that "doing science is much more like doing design."⁴ "Both Design and Research are characterized by iterative cycles of generating ideas and confronting them with the world."⁵ Both Science and Design use generative and evaluative thinking, but Science stresses the evaluative one (by logic, deduction, strict and mostly explicit definitions, verbal notations, etc.), while Design focuses on the generative one (which is usually associative, analogical, and inductive thinking, using loose definitions, and supported by visual representation as doodling, sketching, diagramming, prototyping, etc.)⁶

An increasing number of authors, especially in the last decade, are stressing the relationships between Design and Research. Design is, implicit or explicitly, an essential activity in Natural Science research, and an explicit backbone of the Artificial Sciences (Engineering, Architecture, etc.). In turn, Design, implicitly or explicitly, includes research activities. In Natural Sciences, design activities (hypothesis construction, experiment design, etc) are means used in research, with the purpose of generating knowledge to be evaluated (validated and/or verified). In Artificial Sciences research is one of the means used to generate the knowledge required for design effectiveness. In other words, Design is a mean for Research, and Research is a mean for Design. Design and research are related via cybernetic loops in the context of means-ends logic. A visual schematization of the most fundamental relationships between Design and Research is shown below.

Research nurtures disciplinary knowledge and Design is usually nurtured by several scientific disciplines, especially in the case of Engineering, Architectural, etc. designs. Consequently, a multidisciplinary audience (as that of The World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics) is one of the most adequate contexts for the organization of a symposium on Design and Research. Furthermore, according to Richard Buchanan⁷, one of the four designing areas "is the design of complex systems or environments for living, working, playing and learning, and he associates this area to the System Approach and Systems Engineering (Systemics). An increasing number of authors are also associating Design concepts to those of Cybernetics⁸, and, since one of the four areas defined by Buchanan is "Design of Symbolic and Visual Communications", Informatics and cyber-technologies are increasingly being used in the design of Visual Communication (Visual Computing, Human-Machine Interface Design, Web Design, Multimedia Design, Graphic Computing Design, etc.)


¹ Herbert A. Simon, 1996, The Sciences of the Artificial (Third Edition), Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, (p. 111)
² Ranulph Glaville, 2010, "Keeping Faith with the Design in Design Research," previously in Designing Design Research 2 : The Design Research Publication, Cyberbridge-4D Design/drse.html, Editor Alec Robertson, De Montfort University, Leicester, 26 February 1998. Accessed on January 17th, 2010 at http://nelly.dmu.ac.uk/4dd//drs9.html
³ Ranulph Glaville, 1999, "Researching Design and Designing Research", Design Issues, vol 13 no 2. Accessed on December 18th, 2010 at http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/papers/glanville/glanville98-design.pdf
⁴ C. Frayling, 1993, "Research in Art and Design," Royal college of Art Research Papers , 1(1):1-5. Referenced by Pieter Jan Stappers, 2007, "Doing Design as part of Doing Research," in Ralf Michel (Ed.), Design Research Now: essays and Selected Projects; Basel, Switzerland : Birkhäuser Verlag AG, Part of Springer Science; p. 82.
⁵ Pieter Jan Stappers, 2007, Ibid.
⁶ Pieter Jan Stappers, 2007, Ibid., p. 83.
⁷ Richard Buchanan, 1995, "Wickd Problems in Design Thinking," in V. Margolin and R. Buchanan (Eds.), The Idea of Design ; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press; pp. 3-20.
⁸ See, for example, Ranulph Glanville (notes 3 and 4) and Wolfang Jonas, 2007, Design Research and its Meaning to the Methodological Development of the Discipline, in Ralf Michel (Ed.), Design Research Now: essays and Selected Projects; Basel, Switzerland : Birkhäuser Verlag AG, Part of Springer Science; p. 187-206.