The basic principles of experimental design, as it is usually taught today, both to students specialising in statistics and to those in other disciplines, were established nearly fifty years ago. For many statisticians and users of statistics, the major textbook on Design is still Cochran and Cox (1957), written before the advent of the computer. During the last twenty-five years, our computational habits have changed radically, and it is important to ask whether the fundamental ideas of experimental design remain unchanged, or whether these ideas were influenced by the computational environment in which they were developed. I shall not be talking about design by computer, but about the teaching of design liberated by the computer from restrictions imposed by the need to analyse the data. I shall attempt to consider not only the teaching of design now, but into the future.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education