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On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11:08 AM, Peter Jones | Redesign < [log in to unmask]> wrote: an intelligent commentary on our debate about science. I have no disagreements. I completely agree with his remarks with the exception of one small factual point. Peter spoke approvingly of the American National Science Foundation's (NSF's) attempt to fund more interdisciplinary research. As a former member of one of their high-level advisory boards (with a budget of roughly $1 Billion/year), let me state that their definition of multidisciplinary may not satisfy readers of this list. NSF is primarily science focused, with small allowance for engineering, but almost always the science side of engineering. Although it funds design within the engineering division, this is mostly rather hard-core engineering design. I have no quarrels with the quality of work being funded: the review panels do an excellent and rather thankless job of selecting those to be funded from the large number of submissions in the face of the problem that there are far more worthy projects being submitted than can be funded. The workload is high, the work is done by volunteers, but the dedication and quality of the reviewers is superb. But the reviewers are primarily hard core scientists and engineers. (I am on lots of NSF and national Academy committees as the token social scientist.) NSF's emphasis is pretty hard-nosed. Social sciences are not treated well, except for the experimental and mathematically oriented disciplines such as economics, experimental psychology, and neuroscience-based studies of cognition. Design, as practiced by most of the people on this list, is not covered. To NSF, multidisciplinary is when a chemist and a computer scientist get together, or perhaps a biologist, a physicist, and a computer scientist, or a nano-technologist in mechanical engineering, a materials scientist, and a molecular biologist and chemist all collaborate. In other words, all interested in the same rather narrow, well-specified problem, bringing the specialized skills of their disciplines to bear on the problem. This is a very good thing to do, but not nearly as broad a disciplinary reach as this group is seeking. It is possible for designers to sneak into the funding pile by linking themselves up with science or engineering projects, but the very fact that they have to sneak in and be subordinate to the major science/engineering based project makes the point. Getting design recognized. Getting the human side of design and engineering recognized is really difficult. --- At yesterday’s meeting at IDEO (of which I wrote earlier), David Kelley took me aside for a long rant about how impossible it was to hire real designers at Stanford. David, the founder of the d.school, a full professor of M.E. at Stanford, head of IDEO. Completely frustrated by academia. Don