Inspired by Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial, design science has become a powerful and increasingly influential approach in management and entrepreneurship. Yet much of the design science literature remains primarily instrumental—centered on building and testing artifacts (e.g., new management practices, organizational designs, entrepreneurship tools). As a result, the philosophical foundations of design science are often implicit, underdeveloped, or unevenly understood across the field.

In this session, Frithjof Wegener (University of Twente) and A. Georges L. (Sjoerd) Romme (TU Eindhoven) presented key ideas from their manuscript, “The pragmatist underpinnings of design science” (proposed for the Springer Handbook of Philosophy of Management).

A distinctive feature of their approach is that they connect design science in management to insights on design from design studies, especially the pragmatist tradition of design inquiry associated with Donald Schön, alongside John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy. They also draw on Charles S. Peirce, particularly his pragmatist account of what makes science distinctive.

Building on these foundations, the presentation  unpacked how pragmatism frames:

➡️ knowledge and knowing as situated and practice-based,
➡️ the interaction of abductive, inductive, and deductive reasoning in design inquiry,
➡️ and why processual ontology, performative epistemology, and social epistemology matter for how we generate, test, and justify design knowledge.

To ground these ideas, they also briefly map the contemporary design science landscape—key labels, cycles, and methodological variants in management—and illustrate how these play out in completed studies.

After the input session, the room was opened up for a Q&A.