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Please don’t go, any of you! Being a crazy and crabby old white male and sometime academic does not make us all bad. To quote one of the older generation of misogonists, "Anyone who hates animals and children can’t be all bad!” You that are contemplating departure, please do not go! You are the only ones who can rescue us from the banality of authoritarian voices, and dogmatism, such as mine. Whatever the large scale forces of oppressive discrimination and colonisations, we need you to defend the future of design against the many micro colonising, marginalising, and appropriating voices in this and other design forums. The number of would be colonisers are legion and insidious. They come from many academic and other disciplines new and old, all making a claim to greater authority than traditional designers. The least of their claims is that design is terra nullius. While fighting the big battles, don’t forget the very small examples. Here is just one example. It’s an older one, but I chose it because it’s a field I am intimate with, and it saves me from yet another argument with recent members of this list who like to claim that they have special colonising rights. David Jonassen (1982, p.x), on the field of text design: "…a scientific approach to text design…exists as a counterpoint to the artistic and unsystematic approach to text design and layout that has prevailed since petroglyphs were first inscribed on walls.” Jonassen D.H., editor. 1982. The Technology of Text. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications. You can substitute any field you like for the above: psychology, linguistics, anthropology, management, cultural studies, computing, neurology, cultural studies, feminism, etc etc. You will find examples that need resisting and challenging, so PLEASE DON’T GO. Please value our collective past before you decide to change the world. David -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------