ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to reflect on design from the point of view of understanding. First, it categorizes past, present, and future design. Second, it shed light on ideas of essence, esthetics, and significance in relation to design. Finally, it discusses the formation of "Designology" on the basis of structuralism, functionalism, and behaviorism. All this shows the urgent need of cognitive design study, called expressive energetic multi-realism. The chapter shows how the preliminaries of design theory in the sense of "Designology" may be built on the idea of understanding design in a reflective process. This means unification of science in the sense of natural science and the idea of humanities in the sense of "Geisteswissenschaft." The philosophical idea of expressive multi-realism contains the required seeds. The so-called objective design tries to find coherence between action as behavior, and facilities needed in physical or formally virtual sense.
