Design Studies Award The annual Design Studies Award for the best paper published in the Journal is being awarded for 1988 to Donald Schon for his paper in Volume 9, Number 3, July 1988. This paper was entitled 'Designing: rules, types and worlds', and reported on some of the work undertaken by Professor Schon in the context of the MIT Design Methods and Theory Group. The particular project reported in the paper was a protocol analysis of seven designers each asked to undertake an environmental design task. The analysis revealed the designers' use of design rules and under- lying types, and this was related in the paper to issues in the theory of designing.

The Design Studies Award is made jointly by Butterworth Scientific Ltd. and the Design Research Society, and comprises a certificate and a prize of £200. The judges were particularly impressed by the way Schon's paper clarified some of the dominant issues in design theory and provided empirical evidence to substantiate theoretical interpretations. Although the reported project was based in environmental and architectural design, the judges felt that the theoretical interpretations could also be applied with validity to other design domains.

OBITUARY: Sydney Gregory The international design research community lost a valued colleague when Sydney Gregory died on 1st December 1988. Sydney had been an active researcher, teacher, writer and conference speaker since the origins of modern design research in the early nineteen-sixties. When the Council of the Design Research Society was seeking a General Editor for the proposed new journal of Design Studies in 1978, it turned to one of its former Chairmen, Sydney Gregory, who had recently retired from his post of Reader at Aston University, Birmingham. Sydney very successfully launched the journal, and edited its first four volumes, 1979-83. Since then, he has remained an active contributor - we published his latest contribution in the April 1988 issue, a wide-ranging and integrative review of his recent reading. Indeed, Sydney remained an active researcher right until the cerebral stroke of 25th October which led to his death, and was working on a book on Management and Design. He will be sadly missed by a very large number of colleagues, all around the world.

Nigel Cross

Vol 10 No 2 April 1989 131