In Time for a Change: Building a Design Discipline, Sharon Poggenpohl declares that it is time for design to change from a craft to a discipline and highlights the key failures of designers as a group, such as our desire to work alone and our lack of properly sharing information and knowledge, to demonstrate what is keep us in our craftsperson state. I think this point is important because it calls out toxic behaviors in the design community that prevents us from being a true discipline. Without addressing these inherit problems, we will never be on equal footing with other disciplines and will risk being colonized by them. We need to ask ourselves how we can improve and address the problems listed by her.

In Solving Critical Design Problems, Tania Allen highlights how broad a field design is and breaks it down in a way that highlights two main paradigms of the field. To continue off of the question I posited for Poggenpohl’s essay, I would ask how we as designers can also do better in our rhetorical activities as well as our integrated activities. How can we help people with our designs while also addressing the root problem and establishing permanent solutions?

In Designerly Ways of Knowing: Design Discipline Versus Design Science, Nigel Cross anticipates that the debate about design-science will reemerge in the 2000’s and summarizes past discussions in preparation. The most interesting point in the past debates was how there have been previous attempts to make design a science that included making a unified design method that mirrors the scientific method. Can a perfect unified method exist and does design need one to be a discipline?