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Friends, Here I sit in Melbourne reading the past day's conversations from PhD-Design in digest format and having a terrible time. It puzzles me that a group of such interesting, well educated people with broad knowledge on a variety of interesting subjects don't trim the prior posts to make reading easier for those of us who may be readers. Even some of us who might wish to participate are occasionally forced to lurk for lack of time, a lack of time that is made no easier by posts that carry with them repeated tails of prior posts that show up as repeats, threepeats, fivepeats and so on. To me, this situation is rather like attending research conferences where the worst designed and least legible power points are those produced by people in communication design. And it's akin to those hundreds of glossy booklets produced by design faculties with pages of unreadable 6-point text on why this school or that is first rate,accompanied by such an overwhelming load of images that one forgets the name of the university before reaching the end of the booklet. While the content of these threads is interesting, I'll probably have to use the web interface to read them in some reasonable sequence. And that leads to the second topic of my rant: relevant subject headers. Appropriate subject headers make it possible to follow threads. This includes changing subject headers when the threads change. A current thread on language deals with how we use language for all human purposes. It is no longer a thread about design, but an interesting and quite different thread that no one would ever find were they to search for it by an appropriate subject header. One wonders ..... Or have I simply been down under long? On the one hand, I must admit that I have occasionally raised this issues before. On the other hand, the Geelong Cats won the AFL finals last night. Perhaps this makes me rambunctious. Anyhow, it's my two cents. Ken Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS Professor Dean Swinburne Design Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, Australia