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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