Design bridges art, science, and technology, drawing on all three without being reducible to any one.
Design is not art. Art is driven by verbs: provoke, unsettle, reveal, seduce. Creation is art’s residue, not its motive. Design is different — driven by purpose, with creation as its instrument.
And design’s kinship with science is real, but it is not physics-like — predictive, lawlike. The right model is evolution.
Evolution has no laws, only a narrative. Selection removes what doesn’t work. Mutation introduces variation. Recombination creates new possibilities from existing parts. The algorithm is fixed; the outcomes are anything but. Evolution doesn’t predict — it discovers.
Design does the same thing, with one addition: purpose.
The designer’s stance that follows from this: tight control of method, radical openness to outcome.
