Differences From Science and Humanities
Although many design fields have been put in a category somewhere between Science and the Arts and Humanities, it can be seen as its own distinct way of understanding the world based on a culture of solution-based problem solving, problem shaping, synthesis, and appropriateness in the built environment.
One of the first Design Science theorists, John Chris Jones, postulated that design is different than the arts, sciences and mathematics in the 1970s. In response to the question ‘is designing an art, a science or a form of mathematics’ he says:
The main point of difference is that of timing. Both artists and scientists operate on the physical world as it exists in the present (whether it is real or symbolic), while mathematicians operate on abstract relationships that are independent of historical time. Designers, on the other hand, are forever bound to treat as real that which exists only in an imagined future and have to specify ways in which the foreseen thing can be made to exist.
Design can be seen at its own culture in education with its own methodologies and ways of thinking that can be systematically taught in both K-12 and higher education. Nigel Cross sets out to show the differences between the humanities, the sciences, and design in his paper Designerly Ways of Knowing. He shows that:
- The phenomenon of study in each culture is
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- in the sciences: the natural world
- in the humanities: human experience
- in design: the artificial world
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- The appropriate methods in each culture are
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- in the sciences: controlled experiment, classification, analysis
- in the humanities: analogy, metaphor, evaluation
- in design: modeling, pattern-forming, synthesis
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- The values of each culture are
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- in the sciences: objectivity, rationality, neutrality, and a concern for ‘truth’
- in the humanities: subjectivity, imagination, commitment, and a concern for ‘justice’
- in design: practicality, ingenuity, empathy, and a concern for ‘appropriateness’
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Read more about this topic: Design Thinking
Famous quotes containing the words differences, science and/or humanities:
“What we have to do ... is to find a way to celebrate our diversity and debate our differences without fracturing our communities.”
—Hillary Rodham Clinton (b. 1947)
“The belief that established science and scholarship—which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making—are “objective” and “value-free” and that feminist studies are “unscholarly,” “biased,” and “ideological” dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)