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design? The most immediate impact would be expected in the area of improved tools and environments for designers. The tools might ultimately include resource material to facilitate decision making, such as textbooks, guides, codes, and computer programs. Environments might ultimately be systems of organization and communication that are tuned to the needs of designers. However, the most important category within tools and environments is essentially of a different character. I refer here to the contribution of design research to the intellectual resources that facilitate discourse about design. Thus, one of the most important spin-offs from design research is the sets of terms, models, intellectual structures and, ultimately, the controversies that enable us to talk about design. We might suppose that design would still successfully occur without these intellectual structures, as it does in many cultures today. Furthermore, insights could be expected to arise from the deliberations of design practitioners and critics whose activities do not come under the heading of research. However, there is obvious merit in articulating design, separating it from other concerns, and making it an object of study and carefully reasoned reflection. The resulting intellectual structures would be expected to benefit the fostering of design ability, both formally in design schools and as designers respond to their environment and each other. Thus, the products of design research are inexorably linked with design education. The goals of design research are varied, and the sources of its methods of inquiry are diverse, calling on such areas as history, hermeneutics, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and computing. Irrespective of the genre within which the research is undertaken, we can legitimately ask, How does design research impinge on This article proposes connectionism as an alternative to classical cognitivism in understanding design. Articles