Dear Colleagues,

INTRODUCTION TO LONG(ISH) POST

I have been following the discussion on the PhD 
with a certain amount of interest but also with 
some dissatisfaction. The PhD is a legitimate 
subject for discussion, but I suspect that it 
may not be of broad general interest. 

The following paper from Victor Margolin seems
to me to be closer to the core of our subject 
area of design research. This paper raises a 
number of important questions, and I have 
have taken the liberty of highlighting those 
which I believe are most urgent for design 
researchers today.

1. How do we integrate different types of knowledge?

2. Why are we not so good at social pre-evaluation 
   of designs or design policies?

3. Why are we good at technology-driven design 
   eg. electronics, but not so good at social 
   design eg. public transport, interface design, ecology?

4. How can we build a research community capable
   of answering important questions like these? 

5. Why has DRS not been more successful in its
   stated objective of promoting communication
   across discipline boundaries?

Replies to the list please, or if you prefer,
off-list to: Victor Margolin <[log in to unmask]>

Conall O Cathain



==========================================================
(Starts)
BUILDING A DESIGN RESEARCH COMMUNITY 

By Victor Margolin, Professor of Design History,
University of Illinois, Chicago.



(This statement is part of a talk to be presented at 
the conference, "Design Plus Research" to be held at 
the Politecnico di Milano, May 18-20, 2000).


Design, as various scholars have suggested, is a contingent 
practice whose techniques, goals, and objectives are 
continually changing. What is fixed about design is that 
it is an art of conception and planning whose end result
is a product, whether that product is a material object or 
an immaterial service or system. Design is also an 
integrative activity that, in its broadest sense, draws 
together knowledge from multiple fields and disciplines 
to achieve particular results. It has both a semantic 
dimension and a technical or operative one. 

There have been debates in the past about whether design 
is a science or a discipline with strict rules for the 
production of legitimate knowledge. These debates are 
yet to be resolved because a designed product has 
multiple dimensions which need to be accounted for. Design
research is not only concerned with the techniques for 
planning and giving form to a product but also with use. 
Since products are made for people, the user response to 
a product is an essential part of the research field. 
Because the subject of design research, then, is not
only products but also the human response to them, the 
research techniques for design must of necessity be 
diverse.

When considering the organization of a future research 
community, it is also necessary to take into account 
the existing organizations that have been created for 
the purpose of design research and consider ways that 
they might be brought into closer relation with each 
other. Because these organizations have arisen to meet 
different needs such as education, production, and 
marketing, they have not developed in a co-ordinated 
way and some of them have even seemed to be at odds with
each other. The question of where design history, for 
example, fits into a larger culture of design research 
has been on the table for some time and has not yet been 
addressed. The challenge to an emerging culture of design 
research is to accommodate multiple modes of investigation 
that derive from the humanities, social sciences, and the
natural sciences. This is a unique challenge for a 
research community since the models that exist tend to be 
based on only one of these modes. Because design research 
draws on knowledge from so many fields, the construction 
of a research culture poses particular challenges that, 
one might argue, are almost without precedent. 

However, if we as design researchers can meet this 
challenge, we will have accomplished something that few, 
if any, other fields or disciplines have achieved; that 
is, the integration of multiple types of knowledge within a 
research culture of diverse scholars who nonetheless share 
a related set of questions and issues. To accomplish this, 
we need not use the model of an established discipline in 
order to create our own standards. Historically this has 
resulted in a series of problems, particularly where 
emerging social sciences, for example, attempted to model 
themselves on the natural sciences and, as a result, 
created overly rigid research paradigms.  These paradigms 
privileged knowledge that appeared most like that of the 
natural sciences and marginalized knowledge that was more 
interpretive or subjective. Even though disciplines such 
as economics and sociology originally gave the highest 
credence to quantitative research, today, due in part to 
the influence of French post-structuralism, rhetoric, and 
other theories that have challenged the objectivity of 
knowledge, they are much more pluralistic. Some still 
give less credence to any research methods other than 
statistical ones. 

***************

I want to argue here for a practitioner who can bring 
different kinds of knowledge to bear on a design problem. 
If anything, one might contend that design has not had 
enough empirical research but I believe, that as we move 
forward with the development of a research culture and 
find ways to make empirical data useful to designers and
design teams, we need to keep in mind the value of other 
kinds of knowledge, particularly knowledge that is more 
interpretive.

What is at stake in the creation of this new research 
culture, is an enlarged understanding of how design 
contributes to a greater sense of human well-being, both 
individually and collectively.  Despite a world filled to 
the brim with products, including those addressing visual
communication such as billboards and signage systems, we 
still have only a sporadic sense of what kinds of policies 
might yield the most valuable design results. For the most 
part, product innovation is driven by market demand even 
though some design development such as traffic safety signs 
falls within the sphere of support for social services. 
Therefore, we can only measure design excellence by what 
has been produced thus far rather than by what we imagine 
might be produced. 

Design research as I see it has two functions; one is to 
increase our knowledge of how to make products and what, 
in fact, might be made and the other is to improve our 
understanding of how products function as part of the 
social world. The first function relates to the practice of
design while the second links design understanding to the 
larger project, in which the social sciences and humanities 
participate, of understanding the dynamics and aims of 
human society. In order to address the first function, many 
different kinds of knowledge are needed. If we are to move 
the question of what is to be designed outside the confines 
of market-driven concerns, then we need ways of 
understanding better the relation of design to the 
satisfaction of human purposes. We are actually quite good 
at producing certain kinds of products - entertainment 
devices, furniture, and electronic appliances - but we have 
not done very well in designing others such as efficient 
means of transportation, products that put less strain on 
the body, objects that are simple to operate, and things 
that make more ecologically sound use of materials and 
components. We have done little to explore the systems of 
product support and disposal that would result in a more 
ecologically sound environment, nor have we thought enough 
about all the different motivations human beings have for
acquiring and using products. Product acquisition and use 
is also integral to the construction of social identity and 
much more needs to be learned about this. As well, we need 
far better wayfinding devices to orient us as we move more 
and more frequently in unfamiliar territory.

There is no question that advances in technology are 
primary drivers of product development and we are now 
moving into an era where many questions are being raised 
about how to share social tasks with increasingly 
intelligent machines. As more research is done on the
mechanical aspects of these machines, we need to increase 
our understanding of how these new interfaces have the 
potential to contribute to our welfare.

Only by taking an integrative approach to design research 
will we be able to address questions that are becoming 
increasingly complex. What role should smart machines play 
in society? What are the implications of building smart 
houses that link many different functions to a central 
computing unit? What are the real effects on the human 
psyche of a greater engagement with computer technology? 
These are but a few of the questions that call for answers. 
And the best way to gain such answers will be to integrate 
many strands of specialist research. 

Currently within the community of design researchers, we 
have no institutional structures for achieving such 
integration. Doctoral education is, of course, a very new 
phenomenon and we are yet to understand its relation to a 
wider research culture. But the way we structure such 
education will be extremely important as a means of
providing new models of research. If we are not to make the 
mistakes that have been made in the social work and 
engineering professions, for example, we will foster a rich 
research culture that remains open to the contributions 
from many different types of design research. We need no 
hierarchy of methods, only a strategy for drawing on the 
work that various researchers do. What is crucial to the 
development of this culture, is the posing of important 
questions. Thus far, the field of design research has 
lacked these. At times, particular groups, such as the 
design methods researchers in the 1960s, formulated 
questions that they expected to become paradigms for the 
field. However, in the case of the design methods movement, 
the research strategy was too limited and thus the 
questions central to design methods never achieved 
comparable importance for the design field as a whole. 

There is now an increasing number of conferences on design 
research ranging from design management to eco-design and 
artificial intelligence but as yet we have no forum where 
all these strands of research can come together. When we 
look to other fields such as anthropology and sociology, we 
note that national and international professional 
associations have existed for many years and that the
meetings of these associations have been places where 
research is shared. Such meetings, by virtue of sessions 
organized by members, are sites where experience is tested, 
new questions are proposed, and conflicting arguments are 
debated. While consensus in an entire field or discipline 
is neither possible nor desirable, an arena for discourse
is essential. Every group of researchers needs a place 
within which to survey the range of questions that are 
being raised in the field and to participate in the debates 
that grow up around them. There is a need for a social body 
that somehow creates a space for a discipline's discourse 
without preventing anyone from speaking.

What we now have in design as I see it is a number of 
separate discursive fields which never or rarely come into 
relation with one another. There are journals such as 
"Design Studies" and "Design Issues," which have cut across 
these fields to some degree but without the opportunity to 
present one's research to a live audience of colleagues, it 
is difficult to generate the kinds of immediate response 
and discussion that lead to more refined arguments and 
propositions.

As I have already mentioned, the community of design 
researchers is currently made up of sub-communities that 
develop their own questions, methods, and discursive 
strategies without relation to the others. Design history, 
as previously mentioned, has never been allied with the
research fields that are more closely related to practice. 
It has been related instead to other fields that connect 
more to the second function of design research that I 
mentioned - the understanding of design in society. But 
there is also a role for historians to play in contributing 
to a more effective practice. To better understand what
this role might be would require an engagement with other 
design researchers. Until now, the Design History Society 
in Britain, as well as other organizations of design 
historians have had little engagement with research groups 
such as the Design Research Society, and groups that study 
ergonomics, eco-design, or design management. Likewise,
those focusing on management have not tended to consider a 
closer relation to more technically oriented or 
historically oriented researchers. 

In the larger sense, the practices of designing and using 
tend to go unexamined. A much denser research culture would 
help us respond on a much deeper level to product 
innovations by thoroughly studying their effect on society. 
Design research must also account for the practice-led 
courses that lead to new products. Since design is 
ultimately about making things the demonstration of new 
possibilities is an important contribution. 

Assuming that we agree on the value of a research culture 
that generates a collective process of investigation and 
facilitates the integration of new knowledge, how do we 
then work toward this goal? 

One way is to provide a discursive space for researchers 
with different interests and methods to present together. 
>From such experiences, questions for further investigation 
will arise and conference participants will begin to get 
a sense of what a larger, more diverse, research culture 
might be like. 

A second approach is to consider whether a long-established
organization such as the Design Research Society might open 
itself up to a wider range of researchers than it now 
includes. If the DRS became the primary organization for 
researchers, it could well serve as the pluralistic forum 
I am calling for. 

A third approach is to create university programs that can 
train researchers with different specialties. We need 
cadres of researchers who specialize in different aspects 
of design, whether they are historical, sociological, 
anthropological, or technical.

What is most important is to understand that a research 
culture can not be designed from the top down by 
legislating aims and methods for everyone. It has to grow 
from the bottom up, through extensive discussion and 
debate. Until now, design researchers have lacked the forum 
for a broad engagement with multiple strands of research. 
If we can create such a forum, we can begin to mature as a 
research community. We will not only produce higher quality 
practitioners and educational programs, but we'll also 
introduce design research more effectively into the wider 
field of research on human culture and the achievement of 
personal and collective well-being.

(Ends)
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This was posted at the request of the author, Victor Margolin.

----------------------
Conall O Cathain
Senior Lecturer in Architecture
Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland

http://143.117.118.42
[log in to unmask]
tel: +44 (0)2890 274485
fax: +44 (0)2890 682475




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