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Hi James, You wrote <snip> "Anecdotally, while I was a practitioner it was more I.D magazine than Design Studies. The thesis: practicing designers have limited engagement with 'academic journals'." I guess it depends where as a designer you are working in terms of the spectrum of innovation, creativity, technology, lead-time to market and design difficulty. In one company I worked for, the job of one of the most senior designers was solely to identify research papers relevant to the design work of each designer and put copies of relevant papers on each designers desk each day. One would get back to one's desk and find research papers exactly specific to the design issues one was working on. It was unbelievably useful. The context was a design group of about 50 design staff working on innovative products with a 20-30 year lead time to market. Looking for and using relevant research information seems however to only occur if designers are taught and encouraged to integrate it into their design process. Interestingly, people I know that use research papers seem to find them more useful than professional journals (although they often read professional journals also). One of the limiting factors in designers using research papers and research journals is that to do so also requires design educators to provide designers with the academic knowledge and skills to be able to understand and interpret research documents. This omission in design education may be the main reason why many designers do not use research papers? If so, there would seem to be a useful research opportunity to investigate whether there was benefit in changing design education in that direction. A quick test example, the w3c research document on the semantic web (http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-primer-20040210/ )potentially gives some deep insights into how the future of the web will develop over the next decade and provides starting points for seeing several new pathways for platforms of innovative world-changing web-based design solutions. The English is simple, the concepts are straightforward, and it would be interesting to find out the proportion of recent web-design graduates who have the background knowledge to read it and how many in the weeks following find it changes the way they think about designing for the web? Best wishes, Terry === Dr Terence Love FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI [log in to unmask] Mob: +61 434 975 848 Senior Lecturer, Dept of Design Curtin University, Western Australia Honorary Fellow, Institute of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development Management School, Lancaster University, UK ===