Dear Paul and list,
Your questions would make good topics for a few more conferences(!)
I'll stick my neck put and start with the first question.
Design research certainly seemed far more vital, more significant,
when there was a lot less of it. As the field has expanded and we
have grown a PhD industry it is hard to imagine that all that is
going on now is equally significant or original.
So my first and rather tentative answer to that question is that
design research has come to a plateau and levelled out. If you prefer
a river metaphor, it has become like a delta with lots of individual
streams with rather less weight than the river upstream that produced them.
I'm putting on my flak jacket!
Conall
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