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Design describes intellectual activity that differs across disciplines. This chapter argues for differentiation into engineering, architecture, or other types of design before any general conceptualization. Studies about the ‘dual nature of artifacts' concern engineering design. The transferability of philosophical concepts from these studies to other fields of design is questionable. North American house construction, a technological system designed on the wood-rich, nineteenth-century frontier, is a good example that shares features with technical artifacts and others with social artifacts. This technology is analyzed by applying a framework developed by Andrew Feenberg that, in turn, sheds light on generalizations about design in the philosophy of technology. Starting in the 1800s, the engineering design of material production has been sorted out, and the production of building construction only partly so. Sorting out sounds good, but it comes with a raft of preconditions, predispositions, and predeterminations. Just as a house construction system designed in the nineteenth century brings antiquated design concepts from history into contemporary houses, the understandings of technology that engineering sorted out over the last two centuries, such concepts as function, use, and intention, are smuggling proscriptive versions of these concepts into the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]