Nigel Cross

Marc J de Vries

D.P. Grant

Many business corporations are faced with the challenge of bringing together quite different types of knowledge in design processes: knowledge of different disciplines in the natural and engineering sciences, knowledge of markets and market trends, knowledge of political and juridical affairs. This also means a challenge for design methodology as the academic discipline that studies design processes and methods. The aim of the NATO ARW of which this book is the report was to bring together colleagues from different academic fields to discuss this increasing multidisciplinarity in the relationship between design and sciences. This multidisciplinarity made the conference a special event. At a certain moment one of the participants exclaimed: "This is not a traditional design methodology conference!" Throughout the conference it was evident that there was a need to develop a common language and understanding to enable the exchange of different perspectives on design and its relationship with science. The contributions that have been included in this book show these different perspectives: the philosophical, the historical, the engineering perspective and the practical designer's experience.

Design Methodology and Relationships with Science

Sven Ove Hansson

Anthonie W.M. Meijers

This book is a distinctive fusion of philosophy and technology, delineating the normative landscape that informs today’s technologies and tomorrow’s inventions. The authors examine what we deem to be the internal norms that govern our ever-expanding technical universe. Recognizing that developments in technology and engineering literally create our human future, transforming existing knowledge into tomorrow’s tools and infrastructure, they chart the normative criteria we use to evaluate novel technological artifacts: how, for example, do we judge a ‘good’ from a ‘bad’ expert system or nuclear power plant? As well as these ‘functional’ norms, and the norms that guide technological knowledge and reasoning, the book examines commonly agreed benchmarks in safety and risk reduction, which play a pivotal role in engineering practice. Informed by the core insight that, in technology and engineering, factual knowledge relating, for example, to the properties of materials or the load-bearing characteristics of differing construction designs is not enough, this analysis follows the often unseen foundations upon which technologies rest—the norms that guide the creative forces shaping the technical landscape to come. The book, a comprehensive survey of these emerging topics in the philosophy of technology, clarifies the role these norms (epistemological, functional, and risk-assessing) play in technological innovation, and the consequences they have for our understanding of technological knowledge.

Marc J de Vries

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