Design science

A concept of order science was gave in 1957 by R. Buckminster Fuller who defined it as the systematic stay on to of designing. He expanded on this concept in his World order Science Decade proposal to the International Union of Architects in 1961. The term was later used by S. A. Gregory in the 1965 'The Design Method' Conference where he drew the distinction between scientific method and design method. Gregory was work in his image that design was not a science in addition to that design science covered to the scientific study of design. Herbert Simon in his 1968 Karl Taylor Compton lectures used and popularized these terms in his argument for the scientific analyse of the artificial as opposed to the natural. Over the intervening period the two uses of the term systematic designing and study of designing do co-mingled to the detail where design science may have both meanings: a science of design and design as a science.

A science of design

Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial, first published in 1969, built on preceding developments and motivated the further development of systematic and formalized design methodologies relevant to numerous design disciplines, for example architecture, engineering, urban planning, computer science, and supervision studies. Simon's ideas approximately the science of design also encouraged the development of design research and the scientific study of designing.

There has been recurrent concern to differentiate design from science. Nigel Cross differentiated between scientific design, design science and a science of design. A science of design the scientific study of design does not require or assume that the acts of designing are themselves scientific, and an increasing number of research everyone take this view. Cross uses the term 'designerly ways of knowing' to distinguish designing from other kinds of human activity.