Design Science

The term design science was introduced in 1963 by R Buckminster Fuller (Fuller and McHale 1963) who defined it as a systematic form of designing. Design science was taken up in Gregory’s 1966 book of the 1965 Design Methods conference (Gregory 1966) where he drew the distinction between “design as a science” and the “science of design”. Gregory was clear in his view that design was not a science and that design science referred to the scientific study of design. Hebert Simon in his 1968 Karl Taylor Compton lecture (Simon 1996) used and popularized these terms in his argument for the scientific study of the artificial (as opposed to the natural). Over the intervening period the two terms have co-mingled to the point where design science has come to have both meanings, with the meaning of scientific study of design predominating.