Design philosophy: the state of the art

Abstract This paper deals with an investigation on the state-of-the-art of the design philosophy or the design theory. This investigation was planned by the STC Design in the occasion of General Assembly of CIRP, held at Tokyo, 1988. A questionnaire was sent to every member of CIRP in September 1988 and a revised version of it was sent to DN members in March 1989. The author received ten answers, all of which are very valuable. In this paper, the questionnaire with some comments were quoted in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3 the result of the analysis of those answers is reported. In Chapter 4, some well known proposals of the design methodologies are introduced discussing the connection with the CIRP responses. In Chapter 5, investigating the general natures of the design methodologies, a framework of the design theory is depicted. A general design theory based on the framework is shown with its capability and limitation. Future developments of such theories are suggested.