I think Ranulph hits one of the issues on the head.  The real issue  
is not with the socio-historic origin of the term 'discipline', but  
with the disparate and noncommensurable meanings of design, but I  
would go farther and say the foundational differences are actually in  
the practices of design and their assumptions whereas the only unity  
one can find across design is the abstraction, conceptualization, and  
generalization of those practices.  However, when the concepts are  
pushed back toward the practices it becomes very apparent that they  
do not map equally well for any given set of pracitioners.

Because of this lack of unity between theory and its description  
across practices we step on a normative assumption of disciplines.   
Disciplines tend to assume the idea that there is a unity of  
knowledge.   Unity of knowledge is key to disciplines because it  
constitutes the basis on one level for the ordering of knowledge and  
the social and political systems of knowledge.  The problem of course  
is that other than the unity provided by subjective experience, the  
'i know', there really is no unity.   Disciplines need unity though  
to be able to say that all of x knowledge belongs to field y.   They  
try to show a systemic relation or description that 'unites' the  
knowledge as belonging to y.

Some disciplines have already recognized the disparities of  
discontinuations of knowledge.  In political science we have the  
concept of an essentially contested concept, that it is a concept in  
which we have so many non-overlapping theoretical trajectories that  
we have no unity, nor really any strong common basis to talk about  
it.  when you say an essentially contested concept, for instance,  
design or power, what you are doing is waiving your hand at a huge  
ongoing discussion and for all practicality we must assume that the  
discussion will not end while there are still interested parties.    
What you are not assuming when you say something that is essentially  
contested, is that you mean the same thing as your audience, you just  
assume that through your discussion they will come to see, but not  
necessarily agree with, some of your perspectives on the concept, and  
that awareness of the other has to form the basis for your shared  
understanding.  There won't be any unity or agreement.  I think this  
is what you have with design.   You have people who recognize the  
normative value in the unity of knowledge which arguable provides a  
foundational grounding for disciplines, and thus are pushing for that  
unity, because it will give the status and legitimation of a  
discipline, which is apparently something some people desire.  I  
posit that this is much much the problem with Ph.D. programs in the  
U.S. If you get a group of 10 professors together... they will try to  
found a ph.d. program, because they recognize the value in that, thus  
I posit that if you get a group of 500 professors doing something  
similar that they recognize each other.... they start talking about  
disciplines, canons, 'graduate training', etc. etc.   I'm not sure it  
is a bad thing, I just don't think we should recognize it as anything  
other than what bourdieu might call the 'reproductive function'  that  
is, we tend to reproduce the experiences of our own being for the  
next generation, to pass on cultural knowledges, etc.







Jeremy Hunsinger
Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research,  
School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee  
(www.cipr.uwm.edu)

Words are things; and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a  
thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions,  
think. --Byron