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
-
- in the sciences: the natural world
- in the humanities: human experience
- in design: the artificial world
-
- The appropriate methods in each culture are
-
- in the sciences: controlled experiment, classification, analysis
- in the humanities: analogy, metaphor, evaluation
- in design: modeling, pattern-forming, synthesis
-
- The values of each culture are
-
- 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’
-
Read more about this topic: Design Thinking
Famous quotes containing the words differences, science and/or humanities:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome about A.D. 100] hoped that teachers would be sensitive to individual differences of temperament and ability. . . . Beating, he thought, was usually unnecessary. A teacher who had made the effort to understand his pupil’s individual needs and character could probably dispense with it: “I will content myself with saying that children are helpless and easily victimized, and that therefore no one should be given unlimited power over them.””
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Already nature is serving all those uses which science slowly derives on a much higher and grander scale to him that will be served by her. When the sunshine falls on the path of the poet, he enjoys all those pure benefits and pleasures which the arts slowly and partially realize from age to age. The winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of that profit and happiness which their lagging inventions supply.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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)