The Metaphysics of Design

The paper is concerned with beginning to lay a basis for a more comprehensive model of designing, one that can overcome the abyss between the conceptual limitations of purely professional designing and wider instincts of design capabilities. The qualifier for today is that such a model of designing has to establish a structural relationship to the artificial. The approach in the paper has been to reach back into the last time such projects were attempted in the late 1960s/1970s, and to use as a moment Herbert Simon’s propositions on design and the artificial developed in The Sciences of the Artificial. These propositions were never fully thought through by design. This is in part perhaps because of the difficulty of thinking design in its professional moments in relation to Simon’s theses on the artificial. As will be seen below, in several respects these propositions severely challenge the limits of professional thinking in design. At the same time, does Simon’s proposition that design and the artificial are essentially identical (the one dependent upon the other) ground design more deeply than we have previously thought? Does this in turn offer an objective basis on which a more comprehensive model of designing, embracing both practice and capacity, can be constructed? This is the wager the article explores. It makes no definitive claims. Its aim is to ask the question.