Keynote Speech

The issue of the relationship between design and the sciences is at present not a fashionable issue, as it was, for instance in the sixties when debates about design and science took momentum reaching occasionally a polemical level. Nevertheless, changes in technology and scientific discourse permit to approach the issue from a new perspective.

Designing is essentially a cognitive process or knowledge-intensive process. I wonder, however, if it is useful to maintain the old dichotomy between rational and irrational components, limiting AI to modeling the rational side of designing.

Design needs foundations, and these can be revealed only by scientific research. This can be the strongest legitimization of design science and a justification to invest resources in the development of design science.

But another approach that started from within the design community oriented itself to the critical potential of the sciences and looked for an assimilation of the huge scientific knowledge base into design education and design practice.

There is no consensus about what are the design foundations, and nobody has proved so far that design is essentially a foundationless discipline, or a discipline without discipline. This is one of the many open questions for design research.

In the last two decades two events in particular changed the perspectives of design: on the one side the environmental impact of intense industrialization and urbanization on global scale, on the other side the vertiginous development of computer sciences or informatics.

We can certainly not deny that information technology has profound impact on design problems that designers face today and that information technology is, apart from the ecology, the central new challenge of present-day design scene.

Designers are not known for producing new knowledge.

Knowledge production is not their expertise. But designers can play a significant role in the distribution and presentation of knowledge.

Compared with other domains, design is a scandalously under-researched field. I do not claim authority to invent single-handedly a research agenda for design. That would be result of a world-wide team work. The following research lines or research themes might form part of an overall research agenda.

1) A data bank of all master degree and Ph.D. thesis related to design.
2) Industrial design and its relationship to the environmental issues
3) History of design, understood as a history of innovations.
4) Rhetoric of Hypermedia.
5) Physiognomy of products
6) Knowledge presentation and learning

These are but a few topics that could be proposed to the institutions responsible for financing research. It is evident that this research can only be done in teams with participants from different backgrounds. We will probably observe phenomena of "intellectual migration": scientists to the field of design and designers to the field of sciences.