proclaimed without any concern

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state.

We might question whether the forms of reasoning that are appropriate to natural science are suitable also for design.

The rules imposed upon us by organizations—the organizations that employ us and the organizations that govern us—restrict our liberties in a variety of ways. But these same organizations provide us with opportunities for reaching goals and attaining freedoms that we could not even imagine reaching by individual effort.

But they can be viewed more generally as processes for gathering information about problem structure that will ultimately be valuable in discovering a problem solution. The latter viewpoint is more general than the former in a significant sense, in that it suggests that information obtained along any particular branch of a search tree may be used

The real design problem is not to provide more information to people but to allocate the time they have available for receiving information so that they will get only the information that is most important and relevant to the decisions they will make.

Fulfillment of purpose or adaptation to a goal involves a relation among three terms: the purpose or goal, the character of the artifact, and the environment in which the artifact performs.

We should expect, therefore, that processes very similar to those employed in learning systems can be used to construct systems that discover new knowledge.

Whether there is a long-run direction in evolution, and whether that direction is to be considered progress are of course two different questions.