The scientific nature of Design

The debate on the relationship between Design and Science is not new. Nigel Cross reminds us (2001) that the question has already emerged in an evident way two times in the modern design history: in the 1920s, when the emphasis was on the develop- ment of products considered the result of a “scientific” design (or better technological) and therefore linked to innovation; and in the 1960s, where the accent was given to the methodological dimension to guarantee a “scientific” design process, precisely, and therefore rational and objective. Moreover, being, in his opinion, this type of cyclical reflection, Cross expects that this beginning of the new century would have seen a reappearance of attention to the relationship between Design and Science. Today, after the first twenty years of this new century, it seems that attention to this relationship has become essential again to understand the very nature of the present and near future design. Moreover, if according to a more mediatic dimension this attention seems to want to fascinatingly redesign the figure of the designer – who leaves the artist's shop attentive to the dimension of beauty to attend the alchemist's cabinet who experiments with the nature of things – in a more structural way, the urgent question is under- standing design as a discipline and therefore as a science among other sciences has reopened today. This contemporary reinterpretation of the scientific nature of design refers to the collapse of knowledge as it had been conceived and structured in the 20th century, to the complex dimension of increasingly interconnected knowledge, to the fluid nature of the information made accessible to all.