# Philosophy of Design Chapters 2 and 3 **Opening (not a real abstract):** In the previous chapter we considered the epistemological difficulties characteristic of Design problems. In this chapter we turn to an approach that promises to alleviate those difficulties. This approach emerges from an intellectual movement that has played a central role in the history of Design: Modernism. This was a movement that swept across many fields in the early years of the twentieth century, but here our focus is on its role as a philosophical position. In this regard, Modernism supported a rational conception of Design in two ways. First, it offered a reinterpretation of some of the key criteria of Design – the functional, the symbolic and the mediating – and rejected certain other interpretations of them as irrelevant. Second, it claimed to find important linkages between these criteria,