“Design is not decoration — design is method."
— Bruno Munari, Design as Art (1966)

In 1964 Karl Gerstner proposed a reversal that gives Program its name: not solutions for problems, but programmes for solutions (Designing Programmes). Two years later Bruno Munari made a related claim, design is not decoration, design is method (Design as Art, 1966). They describe a refusal to treat design as a coat layered over the real thinking has already happened rather than as the thinking itself.

A programme, in Gerstner's sense, is not a single answer but a structure capable of generating many correct ones as conditions change.

The problem with a solution is that it only solves the problem in front of you. A system solves the next one too, and the one after that, because it was built to hold up under conditions that haven’t been specified.

To describe the problem is part of the solution.