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Dear Johann, Thanks for your note. I share your view, and what I said next to the angry student is similar to your comment. I recount the story in my summary of the UK AHRC Practice-Led Review. The following paragraph comes next: “Ending world hunger involves political and economic choices. See, f.ex., Fuller 1981 or Sachs 2005. We do not need to choose between two different social goods, research, and ending hunger. We must persuade our citizens and governments to end hunger for all humans. This takes the kind of research Sachs has been doing.” The full account of my AHRC summary appears in the teaching papers at http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman/Teaching-Documents In my view, Fuller made a convincing demonstration that we had the resources to feed, clothe, and house everyone in the world back in the 1970s. I don’t know what the situation would be today, since Fuller wasn’t able to solve the water problem or the energy problem. And world population was between 3 and 4 billion when Fuller did his calculations, while it is past 7 billion now. This requires political and economic choices as well as research. You can read about some of these choices on Jeffrey Sachs’s End of Poverty web site: http://www.earth.columbia.edu/pages/endofpoverty/index I highly recommend the further reading, much of it available as free downloads: http://www.earth.columbia.edu/pages/endofpoverty/reading The media discussions are worth reading as well: http://www.earth.columbia.edu/pages/endofpoverty/events Of course, this was a Danish student, and by 2005, Denmark had already surpassed the Monterrey pledge of allocating o.7% of gross national income for official development aid. Denmark was over .81% in 2005, not long after this encounter, with Norway and Sweden even farther at 0.93% and 0.92% respectively. While I disagreed with the student's category confusion, I understood his heart. I was happy to work and pay taxes in nations that truly put their money where their mouth is … or better said, they put their money to feeding the hungry. Yours, Ken Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China -- References Fuller, Buckminster. 1981. Critical Path. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2005. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. London: Penguin Press. -- Johann van der Merwe wrote: —snip— If one of my angry students had asked the same question, I would have answered, “I choose research”, and then waited (and stared at them) until someone asked me “why?” “Because feeding the hungry gets you nowhere, except for feeding them one day at a time, and then worrying where the next shipment is to come from. Since materialistic magic does not exists, and wishful thinking is worse than useless, we have to do research to find ways of feeding more people on a more constant basis ... and design research has the capacity to find ways to help more people to feed themselves. That would make a great PhD in “service design” ... my 3rd years did this on a very small scale ... —snip— ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------