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All, I would have thought that for most people on this list the development of new graduate programs in design for sustainability/design futures would be a matter for congratulation and not for a somewhat snide comment (Phd list 3/15). The promotional language used to announce a program is of scarce import. What matters is content, and since in this case the DPP papers and its editor/s have already developed a highly significant level of theoretical and analytical discourse around design futures the prospect of a graduate program which attempts the messy but potentially rewarding business of negotiating practice and theory in these areas is a matter of great interest. How does theory work to inform practice? How does theoretically-informed practice work to create "projects" which challenge the existing limits and models of understanding? Setting in chain that relationship, and especially in relation to sustainability, is key to future practice and study in design. Programs attempting to explore these issues should therefore in principle be welcomed. Be that as it may, the questions, and challenges, posed by Uma Chandru are much more interesting, for they indicate the major paradigm shift in design studies over the next decades which is the shift from the attempt to model design quasi-scientifically or technologically to a situation in which design enters into a much deeper and more complex dialogue (and I stress this word) with the social sciences as a whole. There are numerous straws in the wind that suggest that is the case, both in practice (the increasing use of social scientific methodologies, especially in research) and theoretically (as the DPP papers indicate) It is very difficult to see how it could not be so. Design is after all endemically the process through which the social is mediated in relation to artifice and artificial systems. But as Uma Chandra's questions indicate, establishing such a relation or set of relations will not be easy--especially at the theoretical level (the pragmatics of practice will often allow for more expedient adjustment of contrasting ways of acting than will entrenched theoretical models). All this points to the fact that, at present, the design analytical community has almost no adequate "institutional" means of exploring these relations--or of developing depth-expertise in design for social scientists or of the social sciences for designers. What might ask whether this is not a project that should taken up by the Design Research Society and its equivalents? Clive Dilnot Clive Dilnot Professor of Design Studies Dept. Art and Design Studies, Rm 609 Parsons School of Design, New School University, 2w 13th St. New York NY 10011 T.1-212-229-8916 x1481