In response to Keith Russell's concerns:

On the topic of faculty in Design Studies:  all faculty hired in the UCI
School of Design would have to be research faculty of the same sort we hire
in any other tenure/tenure-track position at UCI, i..e, they would have the
same expectations of research productivity as the rest of us.  The
assumption is that, from the beginning, they would offer graduate courses to
be taken by graduate students in other tracks/areas in design, and possibly
by students in other graduate programs across campus.  In addition, almost
all of our units at UCI offer the Ph.D., and that would certainly be the
expectation for all areas of design as soon as (yes, "practically") possible.

I agree that postponing the development of a Ph.D. program for a few years
could create a problem for hiring in this area at the beginning, but I hope
that the prospect of collaborating with the other graduate design programs
immediately would compensate for that somewhat.  If, as Keith suggests, a
Ph.D. could be mounted in Design Studies without significantly increasing
staffing resources in this area, then this program would be encouraged to do
that as soon as possible.  That would be very good news, but it contradicts
what we heard from other people in the field.

I should add that we believe undergraduate courses in Design Studies would
be especially attractive to students outside the School of Design, and hence
significantly expand the SoD's contribution to undergraduate education on
our campus.  That would be a tremendous benefit for a new School, since
undergraduate education is an important factor in the allocation of
resources in the UC system along with our primary focus on research. The
significance of this contribution would guarantee recognition of Design
Studies as a crucial area of the School even if it did not have a Ph.D.
program for the first few years.

(By the way, the book I meant to refer to in my earlier message was in fact
Victor Margolin' s Politics of the Artificial (Chicago 2002) not Herbert
Simon's Sciences of the Artificial.  Simon's early book  was actually quite
helpful in our politicial battles on campus with those who are reluctant to
recognize design as a legitimate field of scientific inquiry, but it was
Margolin's concept of a "politics" that broadened my thinking about what
Design Studies might include.)