Is it science?

Bauer argues that a necessary part of "science" is "a body of agreed-upon and to-be-relied-upon knowledge."
Therefore, according to Bauer, the social sciences are not "science" because they do not have "a coherent body of acknowledged fact."

He compares the curricula of programs in the natural sciences to the curricula of programs in the social sciences. In particular, the natural sciences have well-defined sequences of courses that build on each other; the social sciences do not.

This point struck me because of our discussions about teaching design and the qualifying examinations of Ph.D. students who wish to study design.
Those of us teaching and studying design do not have a well-established body of knowledge that we require students to learn.
This does not eliminate the possibility of creating such a thing, for I have seen lists of essential texts for design, but it is true that we do not have one yet at our university.
Defining the content and scope of this body of knowledge would require a great deal of work to achieve some consensus, and that is just in one department.
Doing this across all of the different groups of design educators may be a lifetime's work. (But how valuable it would be!)

So maybe design is not (yet) a science. Perhaps it would be easier to make a science out of some subset of design (like decision-based design).