Another look at design theory

The first appearance in the open literature of a report (S.L. Newscome et al., Design Theory ´88, 1989) on the National Science Foundation´s (NSF´s) new program in design theory and methodology is taken as an opportunity to track the development of this area. An attempt is made to identify unifying cross-disciplinary themes. It is argued that design theory, when looked at properly, has much in common with system theory when that is taken to mean some very general areas of decision making, knowledge representation, and combinatorial mathematics. From this perspective, design theory is quite congruent with many activities that have been in place for years