Reflecting on the August 2025 Issue — Considerations Nowadays and Implications For

Abstract

What are we? As Maria dos Santos Lonsdale (2025) revealed in the April issue’s introductory editorial, this issue takes as its consideration the present, following that issue’s consideration of the past. The articles reveal various perspectives on our present. Well, “our” depends upon who is doing the reflecting. Ramanathan (2025), Zhang et al. (2025), and Medley and Haddad (2025), all in rather different ways, discuss cultural or personal identities that must be addressed in the things we design and the ways we go about designing them. An outsider might think that these external factors are what our field would struggle with — as we do — but that we would have internal clarity about our field’s identity. Speaking for myself — as an editor of a journal in the field, and as a senior faculty member who instructs graduate students on the nature of the field and its scholarship — I have no such clarity.