The Design of Learning Spaces

tion, and ventilation equipment as well as form visualization. Whether the workings of Michelangelo, Borromini, Wright, Rodgers, and other designers before and since have been more or less efficient and effective is also researchable, but ultimately moot. Research by design——applied to design itself as well as to building materials, computer software, and medical technology——may be largely a modern phenomenon; design innovation is not. As a reminder that design research was once considered a new field, Hensel’s collection of essays is a source of nostalgia for an older reader. As an introduction for those students or other readers not yet exposed to the ideas that research advances design practice and that research on design is a worthy and still exciting endeavour, Hensel’s collection may be a helpful introduction. For an explanation of how current research may be renovating design practice——if indeed it is——I find in the book not much to recommend.