ABSTRACT
Design research (DR), or design experiments, has become the topic of much discussion among educational researchers since the essays by Collins (1992) and Brown (1992). The claim that design of effective and innovative programs or treatments can proceed at the same time as, and is fully integrated with, the pursuit of traditional research objectives, has proved to be somewhat controversial (cf. Educational Researcher, 32(1), 2003; Educational Psychologist, 39(4), 2004); this is because the simultaneous variation of numerous factors that seems to occur frequently in many of the former endeavors runs counter to the fundamental principle of research, which is to “control the variables.” Nevertheless, it clearly seems fruitful for both the production of effective programs and the opening up of interesting (and useful) lines of research to have researchers closely involved in the design process. I am pursuing some of the difficult issues associated with this topic elsewhere (Phillips and Dolle in press), so here I wish to make some preliminary remarks about a related but somewhat neglected matter.
