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(Please excuse my english) In a recent message, Ken Friedman asked if there was any way to do research while practising design, or if conducting a design project could meet some kind of criteria in such a way that it could be regarded as a research activity producing knowledge comparable to what is done in traditional scientific fields or at least acceptable as an intellectual universitarian discipline. I believe that this question arises because of a growing need in the design fields for the development of a more specific set of theories and methodologies, considering that the time has come for designers to stop borrowing their conceptual tools from other intellectual traditions. What is rejected seems to me to be the positivist, objectivist and representational frame from which these borrowed tools are pulling their validity. As a matter of fact, practising design reveals every day the failures of such ways of thinking which seek the unique best way to describe a problem that would be out there, existing outside our inquiry and which postulate that the means employed to solve such a problem can be put together without refering to a specific situation and be evaluated per se. For this reason, it's probably for the best that we abandon this cartesian perspectiv and start a quest for a more suitable epistemology. But my point is that for doing so, designers do not have to reject all at once the disciplinary frames that guide research in traditionnal sciences. Research in design can be done outside practising design. In fact, many other intellectual fields are following the same path rejecting traditional epistemology. For instance, during the past ten years, french sociologists (Laurent Thévenot and Luc Boltanski, Nicolas Dodier, Michel CallonŠ) have been exploring research perspectives very close to those John Dewey described a hundred years ago. In short, I wonder if our desire to emancipate design from traditional fields has not gone to far in forbidding us to think that design can produce knowledge outside practicing design. Depending on what we consider as practice (let's give some depht to the term and assimilate it with all forms of inquiry or activity seeking a transformation of a situation as use to do Donald Schön), one could even say that today traditional scientific fields (but of course here, I'm talking about certain schools of the humanities) are making moves that will leed them to think of themselves as interventionists : and so they'll be doing design or at least they'll be conducting projects. Maybe we should read more of the Phd's being written in these fields and accept the fact that it is possible for a designer to participate in a more conventional way to the production of knowledge.