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Greetings. I would like to add a few comments to this ongoing thread. Jacques' comment that doctoral work and design practice are not mutually exclusive is clearly the case in the United States. The doctoral programs that I am aware of (including the one in which I teach) are interested in candidates that are already skilled designers. These individuals are positioned to ask interesting research questions, address the design community with authority (as designers) and exercise a leadership role in both the university and the design community. There is an interesting relationship between research and practice that we are beginning to pursue at the Institute of Design. Because we are solely a graduate program, we are looking carefully at the differences between the Masters and PhD programs. The Masters program can identify both unanswered research questions and test out results from research in a more practical way. These students do not have either the time or deep research skill to perform the research. The PhDs who do have the time and skill often run out of steam before a series of test runs of their research in an application setting or their theory can be put into play. In this way the two programs can feed and benefit from each other with an interplay between research and practice. Several speakers (Klaus Krippendorff and Clive Dilnot, for example, at the earlier Ohio State Doctoral Conference) stressed the importance of design research serving a broader intellectual community than just design. This was an important idea. Good research is broadly useful -- just look at the way design has mined information from the social sciences. But our need for research is to improve design practice, and non-designers seldom know what the issues are and often do not formulate research approaches that deliver operational ideas to design. Consequently design must take the initiative and formulate and do research. Sharon Poggenpohl Coordinator, PhD in Design Institute of Design, IIT