Recently Live Science had a reflective piece by Ayse Birsel, an award-winning designer, co-founder of Birsel + Seck, and author of the book, Design the Life You Love. The title of the article is eye-catching: “The Art of Science: Why Researchers Should Think Like Designers.” That’s an unusual headline for a science site that generally takes the anti-ID position whenever it can.

Birsel’s article is not about intelligent design theory or the intelligent design movement. It is, however, very much about “design” — exploring how designers think. (It’s hard to fathom any good designer not being intelligent; “evolutionary design” is an oxymoron, like “unguided purpose” or “aimless goal.”)

Ayse Birsel describes her own design process in four stages: (1) Deconstruction, (2) Point of View, (3) Reconstruction, and (4) Expression. Let’s see what these mean and what they have to teach about intelligent design in science.

1. “Deconstruction is breaking the whole apart to see what it’s made of,” she says. We see this aspect in the upwardly trending science of biomimetics. The “bioneers” movement is focused on deconstructing living designs to understand their design principles, with the goal of designing applications based on those principles. Birsel adds, “You can even deconstruct something very familiar, like science, to see what goes into it.” She did that herself, defining science in a quadrant of (a) emotion of science, (b) physical of science, (c) intellect of science, and (d) spirit of science. Her holistic approach exalts science above intellectual drudgery and puts the A (art) back in STEM, producing STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math). The “A,” by the way, refers to “Art and Design,” she points out.

2. “Point of View” refers to shifting your point of view intentionally. “In design,” she says, “you want to shift from what you know to what you can imagine.” Who would ever think, for instance, of creating a carnival dunk tank that engulfs the victim in flames instead of water? Someone actually designed a “Dunk Tank Flamb�” at a carnival to teach people about science. “Luckily for John, he is wearing a super-flame-retardant suit,” she hastens to add for gasping viewers of a photo of her friend John on fire in the contraption. It’s an effective way to shock people out of the rut of the familiar. Certainly in the ID movement, we see the importance of helping people break out of the often-unchallenged Darwinian point of view.

3. “Reconstruction,” Birsel continues, is the other side of Deconstruction. “It is about putting the subject back together again, knowing that you cannot have everything.” This means understanding your constraints as a designer, and making choices that to optimize your effort. ID proponents have seen optimization as an example of design-based science. They have used it to answer ID critics who toss up supposed examples of bad design, showing that optimization provides the best compromise between competing trade-offs. What can Reconstruction do for science? It will undoubtedly give biomimetics engineers a new appreciation for biological designs when they try to reconstruct the design principles they encountered in the “Deconstruction” stage. Any scientist taking apart a cell and trying to reassemble it will likely find Darwinian thinking quite unhelpful.

4. “Expression,” finally, is “giving your idea form.” Scientists as well as product designers need to do this. “You build on the foundation of your new idea, and you express it as a unique prototype, a product, a strategy, a mathematical formula or a hypothesis.” Clearly all five of those things require intelligent design. A scientist thinking like a designer, furthermore, can involve lay people’s creativity and optimism to solve problems together. We’re seeing progress in this direction, as social media breaks down the walls of stodgy scientific institutions, inviting scientists out into the sunshine of the Internet. More and more, scientists can pre-publish their hypotheses and have them tested by large communities of scientists out in the open, rather than by faceless reviewers behind journal paywalls.

Whether or not one agrees with Birsel’s particular analysis, it is encouraging to see Live Science give good press to “design thinking” as a serious proposal for helping scientists improve their work:

Since I often work closely with engineers, I’ve come to realize that the design process has uncanny similarity to the scientific and engineering processes, yet it differs in key ways. By understanding the design process I use, everyone, including scientists, can gain insight into solving complex problems that they might want to think differently about … including how to live a complete life. [Emphasis added.]

Birsel’s “spirit of science” quadrant includes the words “Honest, Truth, Humanist, Persevering, Universal, Illuminating” — each of which presupposes a creative and moral human mind with free will. Can science even operate without these? Notice, too, the subtext of human exceptionalism.

It’s time to bring the designing mind back into the spotlight. Darwinian thinking has diminished the spirit of science, relegating the human mind to the end product of impersonal, unguided natural processes. “Thinking like a designer” will put STEAM back into the engine of scientific progress.

Image: � agsandrew / Dollar Photo Club.