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Folks, Two big points about this issue: 1. Re Scott Barker's comments: Yes, HCI people know much about design, but so do people in LIS! I'm getting increasingly frustrated at the systematic ignoring of the vast literature developed in LIS about information system design. There are many design factors specific to information seeking and retrieval that we know and that HCI people have usually had no reason to have learned. In my observation, HCI's objective is to develop general principles about HCI that are operative across all human-computer situations. To many HCI people, information system design is just a trivial application of those general principles. Not so!!! (And because they think of themselves as knowing the general principles, they expect us to listen to them, and they don't listen to us.) For heavens' sake, LIS people should not buy into that erroneous assumption! Yes, we've been ignored by the disciplines with more money, but that doesn't mean we have nothing to contribute. Many things have to be designed right in order to genuinely and fully support information seeking at a computer. And they have to be designed in relation to each other. See my 2002 article "The Cascade of Interactions in the Digital Library Interface" in the journal Information Processing and Management (article also on my website). I show 13 layers of design that have to work together--there could easily be 15 or 20 such layers, depending on the system. Design any one layer wrong in relation to the others, and the whole information system massively sub-optimizes. Only ONE of those layers is interface design. Have we forgotten that much of the literature of LIS from the 1970's forward has been about information system design, including how people's minds work when searching?? Just because we went from online database searching and online catalog design to the Web does not mean that the many things we learned about human thinking and behavior around needing and seeking information has changed in the fundamentals. 2. The original person cited in Bernie's email was talking about design thinking in a very general way--basically, to help students think about where the user is coming from. That's not just design thinking. IN A PROFESSION THAT INVOLVES HELPING PEOPLE, such as ours, that approach should imbue all teaching in the field. Students may not always "get" it, and faculty may not always "get" it, but in any typical LIS program that perspective should be hard to miss in the students' education. Any course that addresses almost anything that information professionals do has to include "design thinking" in that very vague and general sense. I have a cartoon on my door that it useful for such a discussion about understanding the user. It shows a couple of vultures sitting on a tree branch. One vulture is saying to the other: "That was a good rotting carcass, but not a great rotting carcass." The point being that vultures see road kill very differently from the way human beings do. It is not always easy to understand the other's perspective. ;-) (Again, see point no. 1.) Marcia -- Marcia J. Bates, Ph.D. Professor Emerita Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science Editor, Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences Department of Information Studies Graduate School of Education and Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520 USA Tel: 310-206-9353 Fax: 310-206-4460 Web: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/