Designerly Ways of Knowing

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1. _deliriumSep 2011
   For a design-studies take even more on the "how things work" side, I like Herb Simon's classic The Sciences of the Artificial, which conceives of design as a science of man-made artifacts.

   I also like Nigel Cross's stuff. His book Designerly Ways of Knowing (2006) is good but published in some absurdly expensive, for-libraries-only monograph series, so find it in a library rather than buying it. His more recent book, Design Thinking, is a collection of case studies with some analysis, a bit lighter but also good (and not $149: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1847886361/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...)

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2. whateverdbDec 2010
   A good book on this topic is "Designerly Ways of Knowing" published by Birkhauser. It defines Design as a third discipline, distinct from Humanities (which deals with the human experience) and Science (which deals with the natural world). Design with a capital D meaning anything related to creating new things, usually with technology.

   The book goes on to explain how the three disciplines differ as per the skills required to practice it: scientists need analytical thinking, designers need synthetic thinking.

   You learn this by page 10. The rest of the book is just as interesting as its first chapter.

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3. _deliriumNov 2011
   I tend to split design books into two related but somewhat distinct clusters: books about visual or aesthetic design, and books about engineering or technical design. Of course, it's not a clean split (architecture in particular strongly combines the two), but some books are clearly more on one side or the other.

   For the engineering-design side, two good books, imo:

   Herb Simon's classic Sciences of the Artificial, which approaches design from the lens of an AI researcher trying to figure out what design really is, partly to develop it into a science of design, and partly with an eye towards formalizing a model of design that a computer could use: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&...

   Designerly Ways of Knowing by Nigel Cross, which positions design as a third kind of inquiry, neither fully science nor fully humanities, but a kind of constructive investigation of objects and their properties: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3764384840/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

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