Dear Colleague,

At design research conferences over the past six years, speakers have
addressed important issues on building the field of design research.

To build an emerging field, we must develop a rich network of social
institutions. These include a research literature in books and
journals, professional conferences, research seminars, research
centers, professional associations, and a broad institutional
infrastructure that encourages the flow of information among our many
colleagues around the world.

I'm writing to remind you of an important free resource in design
research, and I'm asking you to join me in inviting your colleagues
to subscribe.

This half-decade has been a period of dramatic growth ands visible
development. We had only a few journals six years ago. Now we have
several: some established, some new, and more in development. Six
years ago, we managed an occasional conference from time to time.
Now, we have several international conferences on a regular schedule
and many regional and nation conferences. Next year, we will hold our
first global design research conference. Where we had a handful of
research books and no textbooks, we now have a small shelf of solid
monographs, a few textbooks, and more of each under way. Where we had
two or three online discussions groups, we now have over a dozen. The
most active of have between six and seven hundred subscribers each.
Research centers and professional associations of many kinds meet
different needs, and research education is blossoming along with
doctoral education.

Our field is growing. We need three vital factors to develop further.

The first is a richer flow of knowledge across the many disciplines
of our interdisciplinary field. This requires a common body of
knowledge, a rich shared vocabulary, and ability for scholars and
professionals in design research to speak with each other from plural
perspectives and backgrounds.

The second is critical mass. New fields grow slowly at first. They
take on momentum and grow dramatically when they reach critical mass.
In a field, as in a physical reaction, critical mass brings with it a
state change. Design research is poised on the edge of a state
change, but we have not yet attained it. Part of the problem is a
simple lack of communication: we may actually have enough people at
work in our field to generate critical mass, but critical mass
requires connecting local hubs and networks to the larger environment.

The third necessity is a progressive research program. This requires
a network of institutions that cumulatively document and share
research results. From these shared results, new programs emerge, and
the field as a whole makes progress. A progressive research program
does not require consensus on any issue or agreement on any specific
idea or platform. It requires documenting and sharing information.
Until now, most design research involves specific projects. Research
results are accessible only on a local level and often lost when
projects are finished. To grow as a worldwide field, we require a
progressive research program that allows all members of the field to
share results for comparison, cooperation, new inquiry, and future
contribution.

Today, we can purposely move toward the richer flow of knowledge and
the possibility of critical mass. We have an important resource to
make this possible. It is already in use, and you can help to make it
more useful still. The tool is Design Research News.

DRN began six years ago. Today, it reaches 4,700 subscribers around
the world. Every month, editor David Durling works with an
international team of colleagues to gather information on
conferences, projects, grant funding, publications, journal issues,
lectures and seminars, calls for papers, cyber news and current
books. The go out each month to DRN subscribers.

Over the past year, DRN has tripled in circulation from around 1,500
to 4,700. That makes DRN the largest design research publication in
the world today - and one of the most successful electronic
newsletters in any field. Despite the success of DRN, circulation is
well below critical mass for our field. Given the number of scholars,
teachers, and research students active in design research around the
world, we must grow several times over to approach critical mass.

I ask for like your help in growing DRN to grow our field.

What I ask you to do is simple. Introduce two people to Design
Research News, one academic or professional colleague, and one
student or junior designer. Tell them about the newsletter, and
encourage them to sign up for a free subscription at the DRN web
site. If I were to have my holiday wish fulfilled, you might even
mention this at your next staff meeting and ask all your doctoral
candidates to subscribe.

This is important to me for a simple reason. To develop a progressive
research program, we must grow our field past critical mass. This is
a step in that direction.

It is my intuition that design research today is where physics was in
1895. I would like to see us move up to 1905, the year that Annalen
der Physik published Einstein's five great papers. For that to
happen, for us to find our Einstein, our Curie, our Poincare, we must
grow the field, attract outstanding researchers, build a progressive
research program, and share the knowledge we generate.

Will you help?

Just ask two people to visit URL:

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/design-research.html

Thank you.

--

Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Technology and Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management

Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University