Design and New Ontology

ABSTRACT The design literature shows that explanations on ontology were made mostly in terms of subjective idealism, and in order to do this, references were constantly provided to Heidegger, who came from the Neo-Kantian tradition. Unlike from subjective idealism, in this paper, we aimed to discuss design knowledge in terms of Nicolai Hartmann’s objective idealist New Ontology approach by focusing on inevitable and limited ontological assumptions in the design process and incompleteness in representation in design knowledge. In the light of the main assumption of New Ontology; “Being as Being is independent of our knowledge of Being”, the purpose of this study is to introduce a debate on a new way of looking to process of designing in the mind.