Design

Design is an important element in the philosophy of technology. It is both an activity and process (a verb), and an outcome (a noun). Designers design designs—this is a legitimate sentence, but one that offers no clarity at all about the nature of either the activity of designing or what constitutes a design. Is a design a plan or representation (for example, a blueprint) or should we consider that a design is an artifact, or a physical and material thing? In everyday language both of these uses are accurate and common—a design is a plan and an artifact is designed. One might offer a sequential account of designing: the activity produces both the plan and the artifact, in most cases in that order (Ferguson 1994). And the execution of the design requires consideration of the physical form that the artifact will take once it is made; making then becomes an input to the process as well as an outcome. But designing is interesting philosophically in large part because it does involve the execution of a plan and produces an artifact—designs merely on paper (for example, Leonardo DaVinci’s flying machines) have garnered little attention as designs, because they’re only plans and not artifacts (that, for example, DaVinci was able to build, test, and use). Thus, philosophically, most of the interest is directed toward technical artifacts, because the combination of their material nature with the knowledge-producing activity of designing is what’s at the heart of philosophy of engineering, and to a lesser extent a legitimate question in the philosophy of science. For this reason nonmaterial or nonphysical designs, such as graphic designs, are also less well-examined, although they do share the combination of both functionality (they do something) and a particular, designed form. It’s not to say that graphic design isn’t worthy of study, but rather than in the philosophy of technology the materiality of technology is a challenging problem that has attracted more attention than the aesthetics of design, at least among philosophers of technology and especially philosophy of engineering. As a result, the subject of this chapter will be largely the design of material technologies and technical artifacts, and the designers under consideration will primarily be engineers.