/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// DESIGN EPISTEMOLOGY: WEDDING REASON + REVELATION Mike Zender University of Cincinnati mike.zender@uc.edu ABSTRACT Although the foundation for any discipline is how its practitioners know, design is still uncertain about its epistemology. Design is not alone in this. Science and theology have debated epistemological questions within and between themselves for decades. Within that debate emerged common ground in critical realism, a philosophy that combines cognizance of external reality with assent to the power that personal perspectives exert over our perceptions (Barbour, 1974; Polkinghorne, 1998). Michael Polanyi’s epistemology of personal knowledge is based on critical realism (Polanyi, 1958). This paper proposes that epistemology grounded in personal knowledge might serve as a model for a design epistemology called Reason + Revelation, that can integrate design as craft with design as science, illuminate how designers combine intuition and analysis, inform how design education can move from tacit to explicit knowledge, and suggest a distinctive design research methodology that blends qualitative and quantitative methods. Keywords: epistemology, knowledge, design thinking OVERVIEW: WAYS OF KNOWING “Reason and revelation, the two conceivable sources of knowledge.” Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998, p. 35) The foundation for any discipline is how its practitioners know. Design, a young and growing discipline, is still afloat on a sea of uncertainty about how designers know. Do we think designerly thoughts in designerly ways distinct from other disciplines? Do we come to know logically like scientists or intuitively like artists? Does design knowledge come through reason or revelation? These are some of the open epistemological questions upon which design academics, and design thinkers, continue to float. A brief account of recent epistemological argumentation broadly, and its analogies in design, will help frame the question. Epistemology touches the very foundations of thought. ‘Is there something there’ is at ground level. Without answering in detail, it’s sufficient to say that people act as though there is a reality external to them. Noted physicist John Polkinghorne says succinctly, “Yet few critics of the ideas of truth and reality are so committed to that cause that it is a matter of indifference to them what kind of doctor, witch or medical, they consult when they are ill. Nor do they tend to regard belief in the safe functioning of the aircraft they are about to board as being sufficiently established if it has arisen simply as the result of a socially negotiated consensus” (Polkinghorne, 2005, p. 3). In recent centuries positivism built on the belief in objective reality through rational study resulting in the methods of modern science. The modernist movement in design was an outgrowth of a positivists approach to knowing. But positivism, and modernism built upon it, fell into hard times in the 20 th century with postmodernism’s critique of objective study and the failure of scientific study to provide for deeper meaning beyond mechanics. A postmodern design dialogue in Émigré magazine and “Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse” reflected this shift. (McCoy & McCoy, 1990) With positivism being questioned, the epistemological discussion shifted from the study of objects and nature, to that of language. Klaus Krippendorf’s proposed “Semantic Turn, A New Foundation for Design” relies on language and it’s socially constructed meaning. (Krippendorff, 2006) As Krippendorf says, the criterion of a constructivist epistemology is viability (2006, p. 22): what works for