(Please excuse my english)

In a recent message, Ken Friedman asked if there was any way to do
research while practising design, or if conducting a design project
could meet some kind of criteria in such a way that it could be
regarded as a research activity producing knowledge comparable to
what is done in traditional scientific fields or at least acceptable
as an intellectual universitarian discipline.

I believe that this question arises because of a growing need in the
design fields for the development of a more specific set of theories
and methodologies, considering that the time has come for designers
to stop borrowing their conceptual tools from other intellectual
traditions. What is rejected seems to me to be the positivist,
objectivist and representational frame from which these borrowed
tools are pulling their validity. As a matter of fact, practising
design reveals every day the failures of such ways of thinking which
seek the unique best way to describe a problem that would be out
there, existing outside our inquiry and which postulate that the
means employed to solve such a problem  can be put together without
refering to a specific situation and be evaluated per se. For this
reason, it's probably for the best that we abandon this cartesian
perspectiv and start a quest for a more suitable epistemology. But my
point is that for doing so, designers do not have to reject all at
once the disciplinary frames that guide research in traditionnal
sciences. Research in design can be done outside practising design.
In fact, many other intellectual fields are following the same path
rejecting traditional epistemology. For instance, during the past ten
years, french sociologists (Laurent Thévenot and Luc Boltanski,
Nicolas Dodier, Michel CallonŠ) have been exploring research
perspectives very close to those John Dewey described a hundred years
ago.

In short, I wonder if our desire to emancipate design from
traditional fields has not gone to far in forbidding us to think that
design can produce knowledge outside practicing design. Depending on
what we consider as practice (let's give some depht to the term and
assimilate it with all forms of inquiry or activity seeking a
transformation of a situation as use to do Donald Schön), one could
even say that today traditional scientific fields (but of course
here, I'm talking about certain schools of the humanities) are making
moves that will leed them to think of themselves as
interventionists : and so they'll be doing design or at least they'll
be conducting projects. Maybe we should read more of the Phd's being
written in these fields and accept the fact that it is possible for a
designer to participate in a more conventional way to the production
of knowledge.