Recently, both the special issue on DBR of The Journal of the Learning Sciences (Volume 13, No 1, 2004) and the special DBR issue of Educational Researcher (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2003) provide detailed, research-oriented expositions of this methodology’s theoretical, conceptual, and analytic foundations. In contrast, this special issue of Educational Technology focuses on more applied perspectives about DBR, illustrating these with case studies of exemplary work using this method. But why is DBR important enough to merit special issues of all these journals?