The apprehension of any field of practice requires overview, today more than ever. Inundated with information, we are obliged to constantly browse, search, or roam, relentlessly seeking out patterns solid or sustainable enough to stand out as coherent identities, areas, professions, discipline or categories. As design theorist Clive Dilnot has pointed out (Dilnot 2009:377), this is ‘the stated ethos’ of the survey, also within the increasingly diversified design field: to provide an inventory, to register what and how, where and when, to pedagogically make sense of a vast expanse of multifarious practices. As a systematic collecting of facts, the survey situates and captures relations, it enables identification of successive orders or traditions, it allows for recognition of characteristics and clusters, it permits the tracing of processes, both backwards and forward. And perhaps this latter aspect is the most decisive: the fact that as the careful assembling of a data set, the survey does not simply provide a record or blueprint of a situation, but constitutes itself a mapping practice, which ‘allows a trajectory to be formed in the mind and that historical trajectory is (or so we assume) the basis of beginning to know in relation to a field’ (Dilnot 2009: 377).