Shuichiro Ogawa
日本語

Notes · updated 2026-10-11

What Is the Philosophy of Design? (Academic Research)

This note examines, through the literature, what the philosophy of design asks, where it came from, which currents it has passed through, and where it is heading. The philosophy of design announced itself as a young field around 2000, in articles and a special issue of Design Studies.

Contents (6)
  1. What does the philosophy of design ask?
  2. Two waves of making design scientific, and the reaction
  3. From the design process to the worlds that designed things make
  4. What is AI making the philosophy of design ask again?
  5. Where is the philosophy of design heading?
  6. What this collection could not confirm

Much has been written about design, but most of it deals with how to carry out design, how to teach it, or what sells. Questions such as what design is in the first place, what designers know, how designed things change human actions, and who is responsible for that change belong to a different layer. The field that deals with this layer is called the philosophy of design. This note examines, through the literature, what the philosophy of design asks, where it came from, which currents it has passed through, and where it is heading. Works that were checked only through an abstract or a publisher’s description are marked “abstract” in the citation. The extent to which each work was read is recorded in the verification log of the corpus.

What does the philosophy of design ask?

The philosophy of design announced itself as a research field around 2000. In 2002, Design Studies published a special issue on the philosophy of design, and its guest editor, Galle, wrote in the introduction that the field was so young that a definition carved in granite would be neither feasible nor welcome (Galle 2002). Galle first answered, provisionally, that the philosophy of design is whatever philosophers of design do, and then drew a set of themes from the papers in the issue. These themes were conceptualizations of design, the methodology of design, criteria for quality in design, the phenomenology of design, and the dual nature of technical artefacts (Galle 2002). On the first theme, Love conceptualized designing as a primary human function on a par with thinking and feeling, and Houkes and colleagues defined it as a type of action described in terms of plans, intentions, and practical reasoning. On methodology, Kroes contended that design methodology is normative and process oriented, in contrast with the descriptive and product-oriented methodology of science. On phenomenology, Coyne and colleagues applied Heidegger’s notion of disclosure to the testing of a prototype electronic drawing board.

The dual nature of technical artefacts, the last of these themes, refers to the idea that a technical artefact is both a physical object with a structure and an intentional object with a function, and that neither conceptualization describes it exhaustively (Galle 2002). Designers obviously manage to move from function to structure, but Kroes wrote that it is not clear philosophically how the two conceptualizations are related and how one can go from one to the other (Kroes, as quoted in Galle 2002).

Galle found what these themes have in common in the way the insights were obtained: by rational reflection rather than by empirical observation (Galle 2002). According to Galle, these insights could not have been gained by anything but such reflection, and common empirical methods of design research, such as protocol analysis, would have been of little help. On this basis, Galle characterized the philosophy of design as the pursuit of insights about design by philosophical means. This marks the difference between the philosophy of design and the design research that observes and measures design processes. Galle also wrote that cross-disciplinarity is an essential characteristic of the field, and that most of its authors, having formal training in only one of philosophy and design, are in a sense “half amateurs”.

The distinction in terminology was made clear by Love. Love wrote that the Philosophy of Design is the disciplinary equivalent of the Philosophy of Science or the Philosophy of Technology, and that it differs from “design philosophy”, which has been associated with the philosophical study of design method (Love 2000). The questions that Love gives as examples include “What, in general, is design?”, “What are the characteristics of a valid theory of design?”, and “Should a theory of objects be part of design theory?”. As the reason why “design philosophy” is not a suitable title, Love pointed out that theories and concepts related to design cover a much wider range of issues than the methods and techniques of design. Love himself proposed a meta-theoretical structure that arranges the concepts of design theory by level of abstraction. In this structure, direct perception through the senses lies at the lowest level, beliefs and values concerning existence lie at the highest level, and the concepts of design theory are located in between (Love 2000).

The themes that the philosophy of design has since dealt with can be divided into ontology (what design is and what an artefact is), epistemology (what designers know), ethics, and aesthetics. The Design Philosophies track of the 2026 conference of the Design Research Society (DRS) brought together six papers addressing questions of ontology, epistemology, cognition, ethics, and aesthetics (Buwert 2026). On epistemology, Murphy argued that, over the past century, the design field has drawn on three often tacitly deployed epistemologies: the Platonic-Aristotelian, the pragmatic, and the postmodern (Murphy 2017, abstract). On aesthetics and on the definition of design, Parsons’s The Philosophy of Design (2016) examined design in general and the modernist approach to design in particular, and Galle, in a review article, defended the notion of a stable essence of the concept of design while critically analyzing Parsons’s definition of design (Galle 2017, abstract).

Two waves of making design scientific, and the reaction

The questions of the philosophy of design emerged from attempts to make design scientific and from the reaction against those attempts. Cross observed that concerns with the relationship between design and science emerged strongly at two periods in the modern history of design (Cross 2001). The first was the search for scientific design products in the 1920s, and the second was the concern for a scientific design process in the 1960s. As examples from the 1920s, Cross cited van Doesburg of De Stijl, who wrote that constructing a new object requires a method, that is, an objective system, and Le Corbusier, who described the house as an objectively designed “machine for living”. Cross summarized that much of the modern movement wished to produce works of art and design based on objectivity and rationality, that is, on the values of science. Bayazit wrote that the roots of design research since the 1920s are found in the Bauhaus, which was established as the methodological foundation for design education, and that after the Bauhaus closed, most of its staff moved to the United States, Britain, or Russia and took the Bauhaus tradition to other institutions (Bayazit 2004). Moholy-Nagy became the director of the “New Bauhaus” in the United States, which later became the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The second wave was the design methods movement of the 1960s. Cross regarded the Conference on Design Methods held in London in 1962 as the event that marked the launch of design methodology as a field of inquiry, and wrote that the movement sought to base the design process, as well as the products of design, on objectivity and rationality (Cross 2001). Its origins lay in the novel scientific and computational methods applied to the problems of the Second World War. According to Bayazit, the Design Research Society was founded in London in April 1966 (Bayazit 2004). Cross described the decade as culminating in Simon’s outline of “the sciences of the artificial” and his plea for developing “a science of design” in the universities (Cross 2001). What Simon called for was an intellectually tough, analytic, partly formalizable, partly empirical, teachable doctrine about the design process (Simon 1969, as quoted in Cross 2001).

However, in the 1970s, some of the pioneers of the movement rejected design methodology and its underlying values (Cross 2001). Cross quoted Alexander, who turned away from design methods, and Jones, who came to dislike the machine language, the behaviorism, and the continual attempt to fix the whole of life into a logical framework. Bayazit recorded that Rittel called this shift a change of “generations”, treating the early methods as a “first generation” that could not meet the requirements of complex real-world problems, and proposing argumentative methods as a “second generation” (Bayazit 2004). Rittel and Webber argued that planning problems, unlike “tame” problems such as those of mathematics, are wicked problems that have no definitive formulation and can be distinguished by at least ten properties (Rittel and Webber 1973).

Schön challenged the positivist doctrine underlying the “design science” movement and offered a constructivist paradigm instead (Cross 2001). In Cross’s account, Schön criticized Simon’s “science of design” for being based on approaches to solving well-formed problems. Professional practice has to deal not with well-formed problems but with “messy, problematic situations”, and Schön sought an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes that some practitioners bring to such situations. In 1992, Buchanan argued that design had grown from a trade activity to a segmented profession and to a field for technical research, and that it should now be recognized as a new liberal art of technological culture (Buchanan 1992). According to Buchanan, design problems are wicked because design has no special subject matter of its own apart from what a designer conceives it to be. Design thinking may be applied to any area of human experience, but in each application the designer must discover or invent a particular subject out of the problems of specific circumstances. Buchanan understood the areas in which design works not as fixed “categories” but as “placements”, such as signs, things, actions, and thoughts, which have boundaries but are not rigidly fixed.

From there, Cross distinguished three interpretations of the relationship between science and design (Cross 2001). These are scientific design, which uses scientific knowledge; design science, an explicitly organized, rational, and wholly systematic approach to design; and the science of design, the study of design. Cross wrote that the concept of design science, design as a scientific activity itself, has been challenged by many designers and design theorists. Cross then set up design not as a science but as a discipline studied on its own terms and within its own rigorous culture. Its underlying axiom is that there are forms of knowledge special to the awareness and ability of a designer, independent of the different professional domains of design practice. What designers especially know about, Cross wrote, is the artificial world, and what they especially know how to do is propose additions to and changes to that world (Cross 2001).

From the design process to the worlds that designed things make

Much of the discussion so far concerned designers and their processes and knowledge. In the currents since the 2000s, the object of inquiry widened to how designed things shape human perception, action, and the world.

Technological mediation and design ethics

Verbeek addressed this widening from the side of the philosophy of technology. Verbeek moved the STS concept of the “script”, which indicates how technologies prescribe human actions, from a descriptive setting to a normative one (Verbeek 2006). Verbeek gave examples: a speed bump invites drivers to drive slowly because it can damage a car’s shock absorbers, and a plastic coffee cup carries the script “throw me away after use”, whereas a porcelain cup asks to be cleaned and used again. If technologies coshape human actions, they give material answers to the ethical question of how to act, and Verbeek argued that engineers are therefore doing “ethics by other means”, that is, materializing morality. Drawing on the positions of Ihde and Latour, Verbeek built a vocabulary of technological mediation from two perspectives, perception and praxis, using the concept of mediation as it was developed in postphenomenological philosophy of technology. For example, ultrasound imaging shapes how a fetus is perceived and interpreted, and in this way takes part in the moral decisions people make. Verbeek proposed two methods for anticipating mediation in the design process: mediation analyses, in which designers predict the future mediating role of a technology, for instance through their imagination, and an augmented version of constructive technology assessment (Verbeek 2006).

Ontological designing and the pluriverse

Ontological designing is the view that design is an activity that shapes how people are and the world in which they live. In Rego’s account, this view is rooted in Heidegger’s thinking on being, and Willis wrote that ontological designing implies a radically different understanding of design, as practice and as objects, and different ways of understanding how we, as modern subjects, are and how we come to be who we are (Willis 2006, as quoted in Rego 2023). Willis held that human access to “what is” is always interpretative, and that interpretation includes not only naming and classifying but also everyday dealings with the world, such as using things (Willis 2006, as quoted in Rego 2023). Rego also noted that Fry called ontological designing a political practice of design that recognizes the agency of design (Rego 2023).

In Designs for the Pluriverse (2018), Escobar presented a vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design’s world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth (Escobar 2018, publisher’s abstract). Noting that most design, from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments, currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argued for an “autonomous design” that sets aside commercial and modernizing aims in favor of collaborative and place-based approaches (Escobar 2018, publisher’s abstract). Rego himself asked not only what ontological design does but also whether it does enough, and proposed to extend the theory through the ideas of Bergson and Malabou (Rego 2023).

Critical design and speculative design

Practices that use design as a means of critique and speculation also brought philosophical questions into the field. Malpass described designers who use product design as a form of critique and speculation, constructing publics around objects to mobilize debate and presenting roles for product design other than those driven by technological and fiscal concerns (Malpass 2013, abstract). Bardzell and Bardzell characterized critical design as a research through design methodology that foregrounds the ethics of design practice, reveals potentially hidden agendas and values, and explores alternative design values (Bardzell and Bardzell 2013, abstract). They argued that its central concepts and methods are unclear and difficult to adopt, and, rather than decoding the intentions of its originators, Dunne and Raby, they drew on traditions of critical thought from the past 150 years (Bardzell and Bardzell 2013, abstract).

Design justice and transition design

Design justice placed at its center the question of what design brings to whom. Costanza-Chock defined design justice as a field of theory and practice concerned with how the design of objects and systems influences the distribution of risks, harms, and benefits among various groups of people (Costanza-Chock 2018, abstract). Design justice focuses on the ways that design reproduces, is reproduced by, and challenges the matrix of domination, composed of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism (Costanza-Chock 2018, abstract). The 2020 book presented design justice as an approach led by marginalized communities and examined how universalist design principles and practices erase people who are intersectionally disadvantaged (Costanza-Chock 2020, publisher’s abstract).

Irwin proposed transition design as a new area of design practice, study, and research that advocates design-led societal transition toward more sustainable futures, in response to twenty-first-century wicked problems such as climate change and loss of biodiversity (Irwin 2015, abstract). This proposal extends to reconceiving entire lifestyles, including infrastructures for energy, the economy and food, healthcare, and education (Irwin 2015, abstract). As far as the abstract shows, the term wicked problems has been stretched from the meaning that Rittel and Webber gave to planning problems to the scale of societal transition.

Beyond human-centeredness

Another current questions human-centered design itself. Forlano wrote that design has been dominated by a human-centered and user-centered paradigm since at least the mid-1980s, but that technological and environmental transformations are challenging designers to focus on complex socio-technical systems (Forlano 2017, abstract). Forlano reviewed posthumanist work, including actor-network theory, feminist new materialism, and object-oriented ontology, and also considered critiques of posthumanism from critical race theory and decolonial theory (Forlano 2017, abstract). Giaccardi and Redström asked whether human-centered and user-centered design are reaching their limits with data technologies such as the Internet of Things and machine learning, and argued that there is a need to fundamentally question what happens when human-centered design is unable to give form to technology (Giaccardi and Redström 2020, abstract). Wakkary argued that human-centered design is not the answer to our problems but part of the problem, and outlined a design based on humility and cohabitation with nonhuman species and things (Wakkary 2021, publisher’s abstract).

In the same period, the spread of the term design thinking into management and organizations also drew criticism. Kimbell identified three accounts of design thinking, as a cognitive style, as a general theory of design, and as an organizational resource, and argued that many of them rely on a dualism that separates thinking and knowing from acting in the world (Kimbell 2011, abstract).

What is AI making the philosophy of design ask again?

AI brings back, in a different form, the question of the 1960s: how far design judgments and processes can be formalized and left to machines. Verganti and colleagues called the decision-making side of innovation, in which people create ideas and solve problems, “design”, and asked what happens when these decisions, so far taken by humans, can be substituted by machines (Verganti et al. 2020, abstract). They asked whether AI is just another digital technology that will not significantly question what we know about design or whether it will create transformations that current theoretical frameworks cannot capture, and proposed a framework for understanding design and innovation in the age of AI (Verganti et al. 2020, abstract). Bordas and colleagues built a framework for types of generativity from advances in engineering design research, and showed that generative AI has two generative levels: one that generates new artifacts and one that generates generative AI models themselves (Bordas et al. 2024, abstract).

From the critical side, some argue that generative AI narrows the forms of knowing in design. Vogel and Quadflieg argued that the instrumental view of generative AI as accelerating design workflows obscures an epistemic shift, in which exploratory, ambiguous, and material form-seeking is externalized into probabilistic operations (Vogel and Quadflieg 2026). According to them, through a “double foreclosure” that favors forms of knowing already present in the dominant digital archive, generative AI projects a dominant view from a specific somewhere as a neutral standard for everyone and makes alternative design futures structurally inaccessible. Citing Haraway’s situated knowledges, they wrote that what presents itself as designerly ways of knowing is also always a view from somewhere specific. Sutevski argued that as design becomes increasingly automated and abstracted, the act of designation, once tied to human intentionality, appears to be lifting away from the human, and called this shift “exodesign” (Sutevski 2026, abstract). Starting from the key role of empathy in Cross’s model of design as a third discipline, Sinclair and Buwert examined the challenge that the empathic behavior of large language models poses for design, using the concepts of alterity in Buber and Levinas (Sinclair and Buwert 2026, abstract).

The volume of this discussion is growing. The DRS 2026 track “Design Research During and After Artificial Intelligence” received 90 full papers, passed 43 into review, and accepted 11 of them (Lee-Smith et al. 2026). The editors wrote that we may already be beyond the point where AI can be treated as a phenomenon external to design, and that the “after” in the track title remains unfulfilled, as a provocation (Lee-Smith et al. 2026).

Where is the philosophy of design heading?

At least three directions can be read from recent literature. The first is the renewed question, dating back to Cross, of whether design knowledge requires its own epistemology. Cross placed the existence of forms of knowledge special to designers at the base of the discipline as its axiom (Cross 2001). In contrast, Digby argued that the divisions in design epistemology, such as science versus art and rationality versus intuition, are false dichotomies, and that the critical rationalism of Popper and Deutsch explains the distinctive character of design without requiring a separate epistemology (Digby 2026, abstract). In Digby’s view, knowledge is conjectural and fallible, and progress occurs not through justification or verification but through iterative creative conjecture and error correction through criticism. This dispute remains unresolved, because what distinguishes design knowledge from other knowledge bears on the foundation on which design research set itself apart from science.

The second is a shift from a “philosophy of design” to “a designerly way of doing philosophy”. The publisher’s description of the volume edited by Secomandi and Verbeek in 2026 states that the field is already a long way from the conventional interpretation of design philosophy as a “philosophy of design”, in which philosophers remained distant from the practice of design (Secomandi and Verbeek 2026, publisher’s abstract). It points to possible reinterpretations of design philosophy as “a designerly way of doing philosophy” or “designing things philosophically”. In the body of the volume, the phrase is used in Chapter 7, by Eggink and Dorrestijn, and the editors’ introduction quotes it in the paragraph that introduces that chapter (Does Design Need Its Own Epistemology, and Can Philosophy Be Done by Design? (Reading Two 2026 Texts)). Read alongside Galle’s remark in 2002 that most authors in the field were “half amateurs” trained in only one of philosophy and design, this exchange between the two sides can be seen as a condition of the field from its beginning (Galle 2002). A full-text reading of the two texts, covering their claims, arguments, evidence, anticipated objections, and concepts, and where they conflict and where they are compatible, is in Does Design Need Its Own Epistemology, and Can Philosophy Be Done by Design? (Reading Two 2026 Texts).

The third is the widening of the people and venues engaged in this field. The Design Philosophies track of DRS 2026 received 34 submissions, and, after some papers moved to other tracks, six remained in the track (Buwert 2026). The track editor, Buwert, identified the embrace of depth, complexity, uncertainty, fallibility, and humility as common themes across the papers (Buwert 2026). Buwert concluded that design philosophy, often unfairly dismissed as one of the drier branches of design research, is in fact full of life and putting out fresh shoots (Buwert 2026).

Cross, who described the two waves, expected that concerns with design and science would return on a cycle of about 40 years and reemerge in the 2000s (Cross 2001). Read together, the works collected here suggest that the debate on AI has brought back the 1960s question of whether design judgments can be formalized and left to machines, now combined with questions of epistemic bias and responsibility. However, most of the writing on AI and the philosophy of design consists of recent conference papers and essays from 2024 to 2026, and the discussion in peer-reviewed journals is still thin.

What this collection could not confirm

Kroes’s paper on the dual nature of artefacts, Galle’s 2008 paper on worldviews for design theory, and Galle and Kroes’s 2014 paper on the boundary between science and design could not be obtained in full text or abstract, so they are mentioned only as introduced in Galle 2002. The original sources of ontological designing, Willis 2006, Winograd and Flores’s 1986 book, and Fry’s books, could not be obtained and are treated only through Rego’s quotations. On aesthetics, apart from the abstracts of Parsons’s book and Galle’s review, peer-reviewed papers focused on the aesthetics of design could not be confirmed in this collection. Literature on the philosophy of design outside the English-speaking world (Japan, China, Latin America) was outside the scope of this collection.

Unverified items

No unverified statements remain in the main claims. Works checked only through an abstract or a publisher’s description are marked as such in the citation, and only what the abstract states is described. Buchanan 1992 was checked in the 2010 reprint in Kepes (Universidad de Caldas), and Cross 2001, Rittel and Webber 1973, Verbeek 2006, Galle 2002, Love 2000, and Bayazit 2004 were checked in copies hosted on third-party sites. For the DRS 2026 papers Buwert 2026, Digby 2026, Sinclair and Buwert 2026, and Sutevski 2026, the full-text PDFs were opened in a browser to check the abstracts and the relevant passages, but because the text could not be saved, they are treated as abstracts.

References

Author: Shuichiro Ogawa (Design Researcher / Consultant) About me →