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Viveka asks for me to elaborate on my statement "From my perspective, the social science/design border is where it's easy to make a case for "design research" belonging with applied/professional design" and she asks "where design research could be located in relation to the wider social research area/agenda." In Karel's 8/21 response to the " terry love post" thread, he suggested several great improvements for group communication, presentation, and graphic design software. I'd love to see them happen. I suspect that the reason his teamwork suggestion hasn't been implemented is that, despite what Terry thinks, the original research that goes into such software is mainly what could be characterized as marketing rather than design research. (Of course there is a large overlap.) The good argument for research not being fettered by assumptions about industry or practitioners' needs is, of course, that we don't know what the industry or practice can become. Karel, Kate LaMere, and others are working on basic issues of describing and analyzing graphic design practice--who are we, what are we doing, and what influences the nature of practice? Karel's suggestion about group cooperative software brings up questions of how we work outside the making stages and what effect various rearrangements of practice might have. Studying workflow in various sized design firms might be an easy start on this. I want to think that Robert Harland is right about the role of education experts in curriculum development but I'm afraid I'm not alone is seeing schools of education as being major contributors to how screwed up American education is. I would hope that Britain was better but his quoting the old saw: > Most people learn... > 10% of what they read > 20% of what they hear > 30% of what they see etc. and attributing it to a book by these so-called experts. One doesn't need to venture beyond the nice round numbers and the categorical certainly to debunk this one. If it's the knowledge that come out of an important book on the subject of higher education, I'll save my time by not reading the important books. The semester starts today. Off to meetings. Gunnar ---------- Gunnar Swanson Design Office 1901 East 6th Street Greenville, North Carolina 27858 [log in to unmask] +1 252 258 7006 at East Carolina University: +1 252 328 2839 [log in to unmask]