What’s the Difference Between Architecture and Design?

The question of how architecture is different from design has nipped at the heels of the architecture community for years. Fortunately, the answer is easy. Architecture is design, but not all design is architecture. That is, many design decisions are left unbound by the architecture and are happily left to the discretion and good judgment of downstream designers and implementers. The architecture establishes constraints on downstream activities, and those activities must produce artifacts—finer-grained designs and code—that are compliant with the architecture, but architecture does not define an implementation.