SCIENTIFIC METHOD

To operate successfully in science, you first advance a hypothesis. And then you have to make a judgement on this hypothesis based on direct empirical observation.

In design, our we make empirical observations based on the drawings that we drew. We directly observe what we just did, and then we make another drawing, which we then observe. I submit that this draw / observe cycle is a very close approximation of the scientific method.

The basic steps of the scientific method are:
-construct a hypothesis
-make an experiment to test the hypothesis
-analyze your results

We can certainly see how design steps map very closely with the core of the scientific method.

And the most important element in this method is the analysis of your experiment. If we say that the experiment is the drawing, then it is important to be able to see the results as clearly as possible. To understand what happened in a scientific experiment, you would not want parts of the results to be occluded. You would not accept a partial view of the results. It is critical that you see the whole shebang. Scientists insist that they see the whole thing.  So as designers we should not accept occlusion and opaqueness in our drawings.

Our drawing is the experiment. We need to understand the results. So you should no longer accept design experiment drawings which partially cloud what you observe. You absolutely need to see the whole experiment. And when you do see the whole experiment, you are as powerful as the scientist to make a critical analysis.