There are a number of comments on the list in recent days on which I wishto comment. However, let me first introduce myself to give the context. I
am a long-serving staff member in university support services, by
professional training a statistician with expertise in IT and data
analysis. In 1993 I started a research project on "Writing and IT" whose
starting point was the hope that IT tools existed that would support and
assist research students in writing up their research. The outcome was a
thesis to the effect that the tools that exist are hampered by lack of
understanding of the process of writing. Writing a dissertation is a
design process. Lack of understanding of the process leads to poorly
designed software that does not assist the writer (MS Word being a leading
example), but the lack of understanding within the user community and
among educationalists leads to lack of critical use. Hence there is no
pressure for software to improve, and what exists is under used or
mis-used. If anything, the IT ads to the stress of the task.
The second theme that came out of this work was a feeling that part of
the problem at research student level was that the (UK) PhD process and
expected outcomes were ill-defined. Ask any academic and s/he will
assure you that this is not the case; s/he knows exactly what a PhD
comprises. The problem is that each one has their own individual stance,
based entirely on their individual experience and with no theoretical
background. A practical outcome of the research was therefore to propose
a national project looking into just this issue: what *is* a PhD, how has
it changed in response to changes in society and the student intake, and
what would be sensible outcomes and assessments? That project is now in
the pipeline of the UK Council for Graduate Education, who have
previously looked at professional doctorates.
My immediate problem is that my work itself as been failed as a PhD. One
quote from an examiner in the first viva was particularly telling: "it is
lucid and well written but doesn't read like a PhD." The dissertation
has been failed, expanded and failed a second time; I have just been
refused leave to appeal on the grounds of bias. The overwhelming
impression is that if you challenge the academic establishment and point
out its follies, that you will be excluded on the grounds of not joining in.
Hence my interests revolve around the design of PhD courses and their
expected outcomes, the design of PhD dissertations as documents, the
discussion of design within PhD work, and the nature of research.
Those are my qualifications for short comments on the extracts below.
R. Allan Reese Email: [log in to unmask]
Associate Manager Direct voice: +44 1482 466845
Graduate Research Institute Voice messages: +44 1482 466844
Hull University, Hull HU6 7RX, UK. Fax: +44 1482 466436
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English is becoming an aggregate of vocabularies only loosely in
connection with each other, which yet have many words in common, so
that there is much danger of accidental ambiguity, and you have to
bear firmly in mind the small clique for whom the author is writing.
Willam Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
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From: [log in to unmask]
The Information Age, whilst being 40 years old is still 'On this side of
the glass' (Or LCD if you use one)
Point of information: This Saturday, 17 November is a very notable date.
On 17 November 1951, the first commercial program was run on the LEO
computer built by the Lyons Catering company. Thus Saturday can be
identified as the exact 50th anniversary of the birth of commercial
computing. An article by David Caminer in IEE Review September 2001 gives
much more background.
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Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 16:32:37 +0000
From: Stephen Scrivener <[log in to unmask]>
> ... The problem, as I see it, is the idea that
> practitioners are passive recipients of knowledge and the providers of
> problems that others solve.
Writing, and writing about writing, is a case in point. Everyone does
it, and academics assume that they are personally very competent (Hell,
they passed all the exams and get papers published). However, few people
reflect and analyse on how they go about writing, and most academics have
not reflected on or been taught how to teach. I draw the analogy of
driving: everyone# does it, everyone criticises other drivers, but in that
case we now do expect learners to go to qualified instructors.
# poetic licence.
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Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 09:29:25 -0800
From: Gunnar Swanson <[log in to unmask]>
> ... One difference can be characterized
> (and, perhaps, over-characterized) as the difference between thinking
> of the result of design as an object and thinking of the result of
> design as the user's experience.
One principle here is that good design should generally be invisible to
the user. Reversing the idea - you only notice what doesn't work. In my
dissertation I quote the sporting cliche, "He made that look easy" and
the idea was also applied to Picasso to justify a high price for a quick
sketch, "He practised for years to draw that one line."
In the context of the PhD, I question whether forcing all students to
type and format their dissertations is a productive use of their time, or
is truly part of "learning to become a researcher." Pre-PCs, the norm
was for the student to employ a typist. Clearly it is much cheaper now
to word-process your own text, but why do universities leave so many
design decisions undefined, so students agonise over trivia (where to put
the page numbers) and reprint whole sections to correct one typo. Where
are the potential productivity/effectiveness gains from word processors?
It would not be onerous to suggest that every dissertation should contain
a simple keyword index.
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Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 19:45:56 +0100
From: Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]>
> We had a brief thread here last July about the issue of references
> and citations. I have been thinking on this since. This is an
> important issue in research training.
> This is more than formalism. Learning to manage references well
> involves developing specific skills and knowledge. These skills ...
In my dissertation I suggest that the bibliographic database - as a record
of all sources consulted and a repository for collected quotes, comments
and related ideas - has a pivotal role in current research. It is
axiomatic that a researcher needs facility with online searching of OPACs
and abstracting services, as well as the rag-bag of unedited web pages.
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Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 10:52:36 -0800
From: Gunnar Swanson <[log in to unmask]>
> Writers are not in control of the graphic design of their published
> writing but they can make their writing "user friendly" despite the
> bad design of so many academic journals. I can't tell you how many
> times I've read articles with ...
One of my functions is running the postgraduate research training scheme
(PGTS) here. We give credits for having a published paper, (a) to
encourage students to publish, and (b) to get them to reflect on the
learning experience of working with editors, referees, etc.
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Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 01:58:25 +0200
From: Kari-Hans Kommonen <[log in to unmask]>
> ... I do not see any way how anyone on the planet (seriously) could
> avoid being affected by this development, since all systems we are
> already deeply involved in, will to a significant extent become
> digitalized.
> ...I have worked with these kinds of issues for a very long time, and
> would be happy to find (in addition to our existing networks) an
> international group of design-oriented people who want to dig a
> little deeper into the consequences of all of this to design.
> Especially, I am interested in the potential it is creating for design.
Another suggestion from my dissertation was to separate again the process
of authorship from that of compositing, so the student would provide,
say, a word processed text and a University unit would turn it into a
presentable book. There's a Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy tears into
Snoopy's literary efforts and says "I can see no merit whatsoever."
Snoopy comments, "Well at least I have neat margins."
I'm with you.
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Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 16:33:24 +0100
From: Wolfgang Jonas <[log in to unmask]>
> The scientific research process (the process!) is comparable to a design
> process. Scientific facts are created by completely separating this context
> of production and presenting the purified rest as something labelled
> objective knowledge.
> Scientific research, for the most part, has the great advantage that its
> subject matter is stable (the human body, the solar system, etc.).
> This is not the case in design.
This is a simplistic and old-fashioned notion of science, but possibly
shared by many practitioners of that social activity. As the other
extreme of a spectrum are philosophers who suggest that all knowledge is
a social construct and has no objective reality. In between are
pragmatists who know that we can never "prove facts" in the sense of
having ineluctible validation, but we can "prove" them in the old sense
of testing them by experience. In that sense, science is exactly like my
description of design above: you only think about it when it doesn't work.
The "objective ideal" view of science is especially destructive when
applied to fields away from the physical sciences where it evolved in the
17th and 18th centuries. Consider the impact of rigid applications of
laws and classifications in psychiatry, economics and politics.
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Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2001 20:47:34 -0500
From: "Lubomir S. Popov" <[log in to unmask]>
> As you see, research is not in fashion in professional practice, We are
> not the only ones that prefer clinics to research. Surgeons, just like
> designers, love to advance their practice by trial and error. There is
> nothing bad in that.
Lubomir, it's frightening. I appreciate that surgeons want to be
adventurous, but they are also professional and accountable. A recent
scandal in the UK (the Bristol Pediatric Heart Surgery Unit) exemplifies
what happens when the "trial and error" justification is taken literally.
My experience recently has been that professional bodies increasingly
require medics to undertake research as part of professional advancement,
and that not infrequently this leads to research that is (a) poorly
motivated as investigation and (b) premised on the absolute faith in
scientific method and objectivity that is rejected above. Good research
is thoughtful and open, not mechanistic and pre-determined.
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Apologies for the length and complexity of this. Much of it may be
considered not relevant to a discussion of "PhDs in design", but is, I
hope justified by the tangential nature of others' contributions.
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