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I think it fair to say that, when appropriately employed, the use of design practice that has been undertaken by the researcher is now widely accepted as a valid method of data collection. However, having employed industrial design practice as part of my PhD (started in 1995) and supervised /examined/seen other examples, I am now starting to have reservations about who can be regarded as a design practitioner for the purpose of academic research. When I go to the dentist, I am treated by a practitioner who has successfully completed a programme of professional training and is registered with the General Dental Council (GDC). It can easily be argued that they are a practitioner that undertakes practice. I would not describe a dental student as a practitioner and would not want them to drill my teeth unless under the strictest of supervision and only if I had no other option. Dental students are not practitioners; they do not have the skills and knowledge (competence) to practice independently. Moving to creative practice, my house was designed by an architect that was a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the same logic can be applied, but without the bit about teeth. But for design-based PhD’s, the interpretation of who or what a practitioner is can be extremely liberal. Back in November I started a thread about supervision and summed up some of the more extreme examples of less than successful practice in PhD’s with a quote from Batty (1982): “I’ve seen thing you people wouldn’t believe”. This position still stands, although I’ve yet to attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I am now starting to think that the use of design practice within PhD’s needs to be more formally justified and/or validated. Whilst I accept that the ability to undertake visually creative design practice (excluding architecture) is not formally regulated by a professional body, I believe that judgements must be made in terms of researcher capability if practice is to form part of a PhD. A useful start might be to ensure the inclusion of a clear statement in the research methods section of the thesis to justify why the researcher considers themselves to be a practitioner. Maybe this could be supported by examples of previous work to create a form of portfolio. A ‘fitness to practice’-type pro-forma that has been signed-off by their supervisor cold be inserted into the front of the thesis. This pro-forma could contain a statement indicating that, in their professional opinion, the supervisor (or maybe an experienced practitioner) believes that the researcher has design capability equivalent to that of a competent practitioner. At the very least, this process might make researchers and supervisors think carefully about their suitability to engage in practice. I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts about my concerns or solutions to the issues raised.