Hi James,

You wrote <snip> "Anecdotally, while I was a practitioner it was more I.D
magazine than Design Studies. The thesis: practicing designers have limited
engagement with 'academic journals'."

I guess it depends where as a designer  you are working in terms of  the
spectrum of innovation,  creativity,  technology, lead-time to market and
design difficulty.

In one company I worked for,  the job of one of the most senior designers
was solely to identify research papers relevant to the design work of each
designer and put copies of relevant papers on each designers desk each day.
One would get back to one's desk and find research papers exactly specific
to the design issues one was working on. It was  unbelievably useful. The
context was a design group of about 50 design staff working on innovative
products with a  20-30 year lead time to market.

Looking for and using relevant research information seems however to only
occur if designers are taught and encouraged to integrate it into their
design process. Interestingly, people I know that use research papers seem
to find them more useful than professional journals (although they often
read professional journals also).

One of the limiting factors in designers using research papers and research
journals is that to do so also requires design educators to provide
designers with the academic  knowledge and skills to be able to understand
and interpret research documents.  This omission in design education  may be
the main reason why many designers do not use research papers? If so, there
would seem to be a useful research opportunity to investigate whether there
was benefit in changing design education in that direction.

A quick test example, the w3c research document on the semantic web
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-primer-20040210/ )potentially gives some
deep insights into how the future of the web will develop over the next
decade  and provides starting points for seeing several new pathways for
platforms of innovative world-changing web-based design solutions.  The
English is simple, the concepts are straightforward, and it  would be
interesting to find out the proportion of recent web-design graduates who
have the background knowledge to read it and how many in the weeks following
find it changes the way they think about designing for the web?

Best wishes,

Terry

===
Dr Terence Love FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
[log in to unmask]  Mob: +61 434 975 848

Senior Lecturer, Dept of Design
Curtin University, Western Australia

Honorary Fellow, Institute of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development
Management School, Lancaster University, UK
===