I love this painting by Marcel Jean. It's a great way of capturing the complexity of trying to carry out research. We're only ever able to see parts/glimpses of the issues we're interested in - we have to extrapolate, and the things we're interested in are in constant processes of emergence and change. Finally, the more approaches we use in a design, the more portals we open to glimpse our areas of interest.

As English school education continues to adopt the language and processes of applied cognitive science, does it risk a severe process of complexity reduction? Do we need to retain a more holistic view of learning such as that outlined by the work of Knud Illeris, seeing learning as not only cognitive, but also emotional and social.