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Rosan, Don't you engage in abstraction when you design? Let's assume you design a chair (I know you don't design chairs...neither do I...but in order to keep us in the concrete...), and a company makes it and sells it. You will likely iterate a few times with sketches. They are abstractions, aren't they? But of course represented by concrete images. In the course of your work you study materials, production technologies, market dynamics,...you develop a sense of how to make judgements of the available possibilities for realizing your design ideas. These are probably often unarticulated abstractions in your mind, unless you need to externalize and communicate them to some others - then they become articulated abstractions. Then eventually you will describe the final design in some way that makes it possible for the manufacturing process reproduce your design. Another abstraction. Let's assume you design something else, like a theater interior. You become inspired by the breeze on a cold moonlit night. The theater should in your opinion have that kind of atmosphere, and this becomes your guiding (generative?) idea. An abstraction? You then think about the people that come to see plays, the audience. You make a scenario of how they come to see some pr materials in the theater lobby, and you realize what it needs to be like to make them feel at home and want to come back for the performance. Your imagined 'user types' are abstractions. Then you want to make a model, finally something concrete! but even the model is an abstraction, albeit in concrete material. I see no difference between an abstraction constructed in words and one constructed in wood. Designers best abilities, like ability to visualize ideas, are manifestations of special capability in insightful abstraction. And so on. Philosophy of design can't get rid of abstraction any more than design can. Design is fundamentally about abstraction. (That may be one difference between design and craft - maybe craft can more plausibly try to avoid abstraction...?) However, designers may have a reluctance to reflect on the way they use abstraction. Most likely because because doing and producing is the main focus of their work, and for many reflection about abstraction and other metalevel activities does not belong to their normal work. Or maybe it is just that the perceived forms of abstraction or the theories to be applied are unsuitable/uninspiring/not useful. Design makes use of abstraction in such many ways and uses such diversity of languages and systems of representation, that other, more literary or mathematically inclined fields may have trouble accepting these ways. And some approaches to design theory that rely on the ideas about theory and abstraction from these other fields, may inherit these problems. So maybe the problem is not in 'theory' or 'abstraction' per se but in the lack of sufficiently 'designerly' theories and metalevel practices about theory and abstraction. It seems to me that this is still in the making, as this discussion seems to testify. kh At 14:13 +0100 17.3.2003, Rosan Chow wrote: >If the goal of developing design theories is to enrich our >understanding of designing and design, and to better our practice of >designing, then is abstraction the right criterion to >structure/categorize design theories, when the field of design is so >much to do with ‘things’ concrete? > >Should the philosophy of design be concerned only with abstraction? > >I hope you appreciate my struggle in my construction of the meaning >of designing.