Design and Architecture

[Ravi Shankar Nair]

Dear all,

Whats the difference between Design and Architecture? In my opinion, design
is the superset of architecture, because architecture needs design or design
should precede architecture. For example, in a three tier architecture, I
design first tier as the presentation, second tier as the business and third
as the database.

My friend says architecture is the superset.

Can anyone please elaborate, whether my friend is correct or me? Thanks in
advance.

Best regards,
Ravi

 

[VisionSet]

Dear all,

Whats the difference between Design and Architecture? In my opinion, design
is the superset of architecture, because architecture needs design or design
should precede architecture. For example, in a three tier architecture, I
design first tier as the presentation, second tier as the business and third
as the database.

My friend says architecture is the superset.

Can anyone please elaborate, whether my friend is correct or me? Thanks in
advance.

I take it you mean Design as in OOAD and Architecture as in Software
Architecture. Architecture is about organisation of components and
application of appropriate patterns and as such is a part of the design
process.

 

[VisionSet]

I take it you mean Design as in OOAD and Architecture as in Software
Architecture. Architecture is about organisation of components and
application of appropriate patterns and as such is a part of the design
process.

The problem is probably that you have different definitions for what design
is.
Design could be taken as a verb meaning the process as I have chosen to. Or
it could be taken as a noun and infer lower level 'mechanistic design' or
'detailed design'.

 

[Chris Uppal]

Whats the difference between Design and Architecture? In my opinion,
design is the superset of architecture, because architecture needs design
or design should precede architecture.

The way /I/ use English, I would say that either

The architecture is one aspect of the design.

or

When I'm designing, one of the things I decide on is the architecture.

(depending on which sense of the word "design" we are using). So I broadly
agree with you.

Incidentally, one proof of this is that I might create a design which allows me
to /change/ the architecture (as a trivial code change, or a configuration
change, or perhaps even on-the-fly). For instance I might have an application
which could run as either a thick client or a thin client.

-- chris

 

[Thomas Weidenfeller]

The way /I/ use English, I would say that either

The architecture is one aspect of the design.

or

When I'm designing, one of the things I decide on is the architecture.

People design architectures, but people also use pre-existing
architectures (e.g. n-tier architectures) as base for their design of a
concrete solution.

IMHO, the OP's original question can only be answered if one agrees on a
set of criteria which should be used to establish the the super/subset
relation - if any. There might be no such relation.

/Thomas