Second, there is the need for our field to enact design science.

When I was a student in civil engineering and urban planning, I was perplexed by the puzzle where operations research, economics, and other scientific disciplines were ineffectual in solving and even remedying the big problems facing society.  This caused me to shift my focus from the big problems facing society to the sciences themselves.  And when I was a doctoral student, this led me to the philosophy of science.  One of the first things I learned from the philosophy of science was that there isn’t just one scientific method – there are several: the concept of science is not monolithic and homogeneous; and no single scientific method is necessarily the best for all purposes.

I learned that the scientific method of the natural sciences, which the social sciences have adopted and imitated, is only one type of scientific method.  The activity of natural science consists of describing and explaining nature and society, and its objective is truth in what it portrays.  We see this in sciences such as physics, biology, economics, and psychology.

And I learned that other fields – in particular, design fields, like medicine, architecture, and law – have their own methods, which are scientific in their own way.  The key point here is that design science is different from natural science.  For example, medicine has often designed effective cures and treatments even before biological science developed a theory to explain them – where acupuncture is one instance where medical practice existed long before biological science could explain how it worked.  Architectural design, like medicine, also existed long before the natural sciences appeared, which was during the Renaissance in Europe.  And legal reasoning, as any law student and judge would know, is extremely rigorous, even though it doesn’t involve any of the mathematical deductions or experimental controls of the natural sciences.  These examples tell us that design science does not have to wait for, or even need, natural science.  The activity of design science consists of designing something new, and its objective is effectiveness in solving a real-world problem.