This chapter is primarily concerned with developing an understanding of design as a ‘third area’ within general education. It compares and contrasts design with the other two well-established areas—sciences and humanities—and goes on to consider the criteria that design must satisfy to be acceptable as a part of general education. This implies a reorientation from the instrumental aims of conventional, professionally-orientated design education, towards intrinsic values of design as a valid subject of study for everyone. These intrinsic values must derive from the deep, underlying patterns of how designers think and act, or the ‘designerly ways of knowing’. Because of their common concern with these fundamental ‘ways of knowing’, both design research and design education are contributing to the development of design as a discipline. This emerging view that ‘there are designerly ways of knowing’ could form an axiomatic ‘touch-stone theory’ for research within design as a discipline.