CAN DESIGN BE PRESCRIPTIVE?
SYSTEMATIC DESIGN THROUGH DISCOURSE OF SCIENTIFICATION OF DESIGN

Jones Chris Jones (1984) declared that “In the 1970’s I reacted against design methods. I dislike the machine language, the behaviourism, the continual attempt to fix the whole of life into a logical framework”.

It was a failure for who were working on the earlier ideas of the master after the decade in which for the first time the “design methodology movement” (Cross, 1992) appeared by a conference in 1962 following with series of design methods conferences and books.

“Design methods people were looking at rational methods of incorporating scientific techniques and knowledge into the design process to make rational decisions…” (Bayazıt, 2004). The opinions range from a strong believe in the success of using scientific methods in design to the feeling that a scientific approach to design is incompatible with the dominant role for free creativity in design (Vries, 1992). Vries refers to the Cross’s statement;”…methodology of design is not a good basis for developing a methodology of design”.

In the first decade of the design methodology mostly it was accepted that scientificaton of design can be developed by systematic design methods. Nevertheless Rittel’s “Second Generation Methods” was specifying the satisfying solutions for wicked design problems.

The evolution of design methods and the attempts to propose a recipe for design process in design methodology history were having relations with root of the Descartes’s system proposition to the scientific approach. In this paper towering systematic design proposals will be discussed in the context of Cross (1992) clarification about the terms Scientific Design, Science of Design and Design Science. The prescriptive design methods will be explored with the failure assertions in design research literature if they are really differ from the rational of design.

References
Bayazıt, 2004, Investigating Design: A Review of Forty Years of design research, Design Issue, Volume 22 Number 1
Jones, J. C., 1984, How My Thoughts about Design Methods have Changed During the Years, Developments in Design Methodology, John Wiley@Sons, page 329
M. J. de Vries, N. Cross, 1992, Design Methodology and Relationships with Science, Nato Science Series D