The folks at the NextDesign Leadership Institute have publically announced their new journal, which "has been created to explore how the concept of design leadership is being rethought and reinvented as a response to the massive changes underway in the marketplace."

An article of interest, especially given the recent discussion here about the term design, is an interview with Ken Friedman (a research/academic who is quite active on the ) on design research. For this audience, issues with design are at a different level than semantics, and focus more on philosophy, theory, and application of research to practice (a biggie in many fields).

It's a good read, though a bit wordy (as interviews handled by email can easily be). In particular, I found this bit at the end interesting:

As a professional field, design faces ten major challenges today. There are three performance challenges, four substantive challenges, and three contextual challenges. The performance challenges of design are to:

1. Act on the physical world.

2. Address human needs.

3. Generate the built environment.

These challenges require frameworks of theory and research to address contemporary professional problems and solve individual cases. The professional problems of design involve four substantive challenges:

1. Increasingly ambiguous boundaries between artifact, structure, and process.

2. Increasingly large-scale social, economic, and industrial frames.

3. An increasingly complex environment of needs, requirements, and constraints.

4. Information content that often exceeds the value of physical substance.

In an integrated knowledge economy, design also involves three contextual challenges. These are:

1. A complex environment in which many projects or products cross the boundaries of several organizations, stakeholder, producer, and user groups.

2. Projects or products that must meet the expectations of many organizations, stakeholders, producers, and users.

3. Demands at every level of production, distribution, reception, and control.

These ten challenges require a qualitatively different approach to professional practice than was needed in earlier times.

Maybe it is just wishful thinking, but there sure seems to be room for some level of collaboration and compromise between those that would do design and those that would do user experience.

Or perhaps this will be like the seemingly unsolvable problem in the RSS space...and really is about the name?

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