Abstract This paper sets out to consider the nature of research or enquiry that is appropriate to the study of the design curriculum. It is suggested that the nature of educational enquiry is different from that of research in the natural sciences, which has often been mistakenly adopted as a paradigm. Educational enquiry must be based on educational practice and must start from the experience of educational action. Design activity is identified as a strand of human action, specifically concerned with ill-defined problems, and exercised through the cognitive modelling capacity of the mind. There is a fundamental semantic dimension to design activity and design educational activity, and thus enquiry into these activities is necessarily a semantic enquiry.
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