The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial

between design and artificiality, a topic that is even more alive today than a quarter of a century ago, as the essays in this special edition of Design Issues show. Historically and traditionally, it has been the task of the science disciplines to teach about natural things: how they are and how they work. It has been the task of engineering schools to teach about artificial things: how to make artifacts that have desired properties and how to design. Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that precribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. Design, so construed, is the core of all professional training: it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from the sciences. Schools of engineering, as well as schools of architecture, business, education, law, and medicine, are all centrally concerned with the process of design. In view of the key role of design in professional activity, it is ironic that in this century the natural sciences have almost driven the sciences of the artificial from professional school curricula. Engineering schools have become schools of physics and mathematics; medical schools have become schools of biological science; business schools have become schools of finite mathematics. The use of adjectives like "applied" conceals, but does not change, the fact. It simply means that in the professional schools those topics are selected from mathematics and the natural sciences for emphasis which are thought to be most nearly relevant to professional practice. It does not mean that design is taught, as distinguished from analysis. The movement toward natural science and away from the sciences of the artificial has proceeded further and faster in engineering, business, and medicine than in the other professional fields I have mentioned, though it has by no means been absent from schools of law, journalism, and library science. The stronger universities are more deeply affected than the weaker, and the graduate programs more than the undergraduate. Few doctoral dissertations in first-rate professional schools today deal with