Hi Terry;
Thanks for your post. It looks like we are at opposite ends of the 
spectrum on the double blind review issue. If design research or 
design studies were a discipline like organic chemistry or topology 
where the same basic knowledge was equally distributed among all the 
members and there was a widespread consensus on competency, well, a 
blind review might work because the standards of the field would be 
quite clear. But, to the contrary, design research seems to be 
working too hard often to follow the wrong model. Design is a 
contingent practice and there is, despite arguments to the contrary, 
no common knowledge base among design researchers that would insure 
that all research was of so called "quality." As I mentioned in my 
initial response to Gavin, the top journals in the field of design 
research do not uniformly adhere to a policy of double blind review 
and they are none the worse off for it. In fact, the requirement to 
review all articles in a similar way produces a draconian constraint 
on what a journal might publish. Design Issues, for example, the 
journal with which I have been associated for 25 years, publishes a 
variety of pieces ranging from scholarly articles to personal essays. 
It is our contention that the multiple forms of writing contribute to 
a broad discourse on designing and its consequences. If design is a 
contingent practice, why should design discourse not be the same? As 
to quality, would anyone say that the Partisan Review was not a 
publication of quality and that it did not contribute sufficiently to 
the multiple fields of politics and culture? It owes its success over 
many years to several editors including Philip Rahv. There is much to 
be said for seasoned editors, along with an advisory board of 
specialist experts, having the capability to make decisions about the 
quality of an article. In fact, if we were to deconstruct the whole 
double blind review we would have to say the following:
1) reviewers have particular prejudices and often reject articles 
because they do not agree with the author's point of view
2) reviewers can sometimes guess who wrote a particular article and 
thus review it on a personal basis
3) a reviewer may have more ego involved in reviewing an article than an editor
4) a reviewer may not be competent to review an article even though 
chosen for the job
I could go on. Mainly, I would argue that the idea that blind reviews 
produce better quality than other ways of choosing articles is a myth 
that completely undermines the assumption that an experienced editor 
will be sufficiently competent if not more so than a chosen reviewer.
The danger of a so called objective review process is that all the 
credit or value is given to those journals that conform to the 
process even if they do not actually produce better quality work. An 
additional problem is that scholars may not get promoted unless they 
adhere to these abstract national criteria. I remember some years ago 
when I was a visiting professor at UTS in Sydney and I heard that Eva 
Cox, a distinguished internationally known scholar at the university, 
got less academic credit for delivering the prestigious series of 
Boyer Lectures, sponsored by the Australian Broadcasting Company, 
than one would get for a paper in a refereed journal.
In my opinion, a review body adopts so called measurable standards to 
ascertain excellence when it does not have enough confidence to judge 
quality by other means. Could you develop a measurable standard for 
the articles in the Partisan Review or the New Yorker or the London 
Times Literary Supplement? I doubt it. So called measures of quality 
are intended for people who have no knowledge of a field and must 
rely on some mythic objectivity to make themselves feel good about 
their decision-making.
Also, I am not sure what old boy networks you refer to that have 
clogged up design research. The journals I am aware of, including The 
Design Journal started by Rachel Cooper, are not such publications 
and I see a generally open field when it comes to publishing. Design 
Issues, for example, has published articles by scholars from at least 
thirty countries if not more, many of them by young scholars. So, to 
finish up, I see the mechanical imposition of reviewing standards as 
a practice that will inhibit or fail to reward quality scholarship 
and thought in general that does not fit into a mold. I'd be 
interested to hear an argument to the contrary.
Victor Margolin
Co-editor, Design Issues
-- 
Victor Margolin
Professor Emeritus of Design History
Department of Art History
University of Illinois at Chicago
935 W. Harrison St.
Chicago, IL 60607-7039
Tel. 1-312-583-0608
Fax 1-312-413-2460
website: www.uic.edu/~victor