International Symposium on
Design and Research
In Artificial and Natural Sciences
In the context of
The World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WMSCI 2010
June 29th - July 2nd, 2010 – Orlando, Florida, USA
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 generativeone (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.
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