Opinion PieceScience versus design; comparable, contrastive or conducive?☆
Introduction
As many at his time, Leonardo da Vinci was a scientist, designer and artist: after a scientific study of bird flight he was able to design an airplane. Nowadays, specialisation generally brings us to consider science and design as fully separated and fundamentally different domains (Fig. 1). Design aims at realising a new world from existing knowledge, while science aims at realising new knowledge from the existing world. Design starts with defining the goal and function (analysis) to end with a structure (synthesis); science starts with a structure (synthesis), defines its function and finally its goal (analysis).
Also in practice, science and design are considered to be completely different (Divall, 1991). Grant (1979) stated this clearly: ‘the act of designing itself is not and will not ever be a scientific activity’. And Fallman (2007) stated: ‘The difference between academic science and commercial design needs to be recognised and made explicit. It is simply too much to do both good design, with a happy client, and good science, with happy peers’.
Some attempts have been made to bridge the two. Kesselring, 1942, Kesselring, 1954 already discussed the link between design and science. Gregory (1966) introduced the term ‘design science’, meaning that design is, like science, organised in a systematic way (Cross, 2007). Glanville (1999) even envisioned science is a restricted form of design: when scientific questions are answered, they create many more new scientific questions. Such a circular process is also present in the design process. A third link is that design as a method may be the subject of scientific investigation (Grant, 1979, Restrepo and Christiaans, 2004, Cross, 2001). This made Fallman (2007) to introduce the concept of ‘design-oriented research’, being the study of the designed product in use, or of the process of bringing the product into being.
Indeed, all of these studies presented analogies between science and design, mainly focused on their characteristics, rather than on the methodology or content of the process: the only similarities found are that both are structured, iterative and systematic. Each process has a unique and different methodology and goal: science studies the world to create new knowledge, design uses knowledge to create a new world. Because of this distinct difference, both the methods are applied fully independently, each by its own specialists: scientists and designers.
The goal of this article is to show that this strict separation between science and design is counterproductive. Design needs science and science needs design. When the two methods are used in addition to each other, both methods benefit: both become much more efficient and effective.
Section snippets
Science
In this article, science is schematically considered as the generation of a hypotheses or models that are confirmed or falsified by experimental research, producing new knowledge in repeatable and unambiguous fashion. Science is coherent: the outcome, new knowledge, fits existing knowledge and is consistent with it.
Knowledge is expressed in terms of relationships among events or variables. Scientific experiments permit to determine these relationships by monitoring the change of relevant
Design
In the 20th century design evolved from an arts-and-crafts movement to a specialism taught at university level worldwide. Influencing pioneers originated from Germany (Kesselring, 1942, Kesselring, 1954, Tschnochner, 1954) and the UK (Bernhard, 2004, Forty, 1986). The 1962 ‘Conference on Design Methods’ is generally regarded as the event where the concept of design methodology was introduced (Cross, 2007, Jones and Thornley, 1963) according to which design is considered as a process occurring
Design needs science
The design process is indirectly associated with science: In the design process numerous alternative solutions are generated, based on existing knowledge acquired through scientific processes. Science improves on the design process also directly:
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When requirements are not known (e.g. what is the maximum load a new hip prosthesis has to withstand?) scientific research helps quantify them.
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Judging the various concepts that have been created on basis of the requirements often requires building
Science needs design
There are four major reasons why experimental science needs design:
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Scientific projects in general and on biomedical materials research in particular must rely on the use of specific measuring systems, equipment or processes to pursue its experiments. The design of such a device can ‘colour’ the outcome of the very experiments they are created to assist and can and has lead to results which are often meaningless and even have the wrong answer to an hypothesis. The design process is able to
Discussion
The requirements of regulations that all decisions and considerations made during the design process are traceable make a methodological approach of the design process very beneficial, because it forces to take well-pondered decisions and streamlines the documentation process by its division into phases and sub-phases. This is particular important for new biomaterials applications and new medical devices.
The design process is characterised by its extensive analysis of the problem, definition of
Call for a change
Specialisation brings along the risk of developing a tunnel-vision mentality and narrow-minded approaches to problem solving. In engineering education, science and design are fully separated and thus a tunnel-vision is created. We strongly believe that integrating both is necessary as part of a new way of educating engineering students. Introducing design methods in scientific disciplines may help reversing this trend. Their contrastiveness should be explained and benefits should be made clear.
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