ABSTRACT
The word 'design' has become something of a 'Humpty Dumpty word', meaning just about anything the user wants it to mean. Early uses of the word, both as a verb and a noun, related to the production of drawings of some engineering artefact to be manufactured. Nowadays its use as a verb relates to almost any part of the act of creation of almost any product, from a building to a T-shirt or hairstyle, while as a noun the word now usually relates to an abstract quality of an artefact-something about the way it looks, its image, its style. Even after restricting the fteld of interest to that of designing buildings, there can still be confusion or ambiguity. If one were to ask who designed the Sydney Opera House, some people might reply Utzon (an architect) while others might reply Ove Arup & Partners (a form of consulting engineers).The present paper will concentrate on a particular sense of the word 'design', relating principally
