A theory of science for design

Since my appointment in February 2006 (at the former Danish Design School) virtually all of my research has been conducted within the framework of this project. At that time the ‘academisation’ of design education was new and highly controversial, which originally prompted the project.
My aim is to develop a conception of design as a profession in pursuit of artistic and academic values alike, and to convey this idea to design students in a way that makes sense to them. Accordingly, the overall research theme of the project is the relationship between design and science.
More specifically, design is about how reality might be, rather than how it is or was. So prima facie, conventional scientific ideas of systematic observation and experiments as sources of reliable knowledge seem inadequate to design. Consequently, it is a central and challenging question of the project whether designers produce reliable knowledge at all – and if so, what the subject matter of this knowledge is, and what makes it reliable?
Methodically and theoretically I draw predominantly on contemporary analytic philosophy and its debates on subjects such as the concept of knowledge, conditionals (‘if ... then ...’), modality (possibility / necessity), properties, causality, and laws of nature.