ABSTRACT
What design is remains controversial. Views are shaped by people’s different perspectives, which depend both on the particular design disciplines they practise or study, and on the concerns and the theoretical and methodological concepts and tools of the intellectual disciplines they bring to looking at design. This chapter looks at just how different some alternative views are and argues that the different types of design are too diverse to make agreeing on a crisp definition of design a feasible enterprise. Instead, we should accept that design is a family resemblance concept, and that different and seemingly contradictory views on what design is can be valid. What follows from this is that we should focus cross-disciplinary studies on understanding the patterns of similarity and difference that connect different design fields, but do not apply to all types of design. Moreover, we should treat knowledge generation and problem-framing activities as legitimate and important parts of design.
