Artist-Scientists Are Designers

Abstract

Design encompasses a flexible set of ideas that occur naturally across multiple domains. Richard Buchanan describes the trajectory of design over the 20th century. Design began as trade and slowly attained the status of a profession. Later, it became a field for technical research. It has shifted at last to what Buchanan describes as the “liberal art of technical culture.” As liberal arts developed over the 19th century, subject matter divided into the compartmentalized arenas of knowledge that we see in our universities today. A narrow focus offers advantages in research with many disciplines, particularly in the natural sciences and mathematics. Despite this benefit, the compartmentalized and divided disciplines of the modern university create problems when scholars and scientists must understand the complexities of human action in the world. The problem of specialization also calls for integrative disciplines---disciplines that require conceptual processes to bridge such separate fields as art, mathematics, natural science and social science. We control each of these domains through algorithms that we create and apply in different ways [1].