Hi Rosan,
Thank you for the reference to the draft of Clive Dilnot's paper. Also
many thanks for posing difficult questions to think about.
I respect Clive's work. I feel he has pushed a lot of idea boundaries
and opened key insights that have moved design research along. The paper
you refer to is a paper that does this - it opens up idea pathways. The
paper and its analyses, however, are now 4 years old and a lot has moved
on in Design Research at PhD level since then. In particular, there is
much greater clarity that the term 'design' has, in the past, tacitly
and unhelpfully conflated lots of different aspects of design processes
(e.g. drawing, researching, data gathering, creating new ideas, empathising,
understanding others viewpoints, team building, etc). The decomposition
of the concept of 'design' over the last three or so years has made more
visible these sub-processes, and been helpful in supporting researchers
in exploring, analysing and discussing issues specific to different facets
of design research iwith greater clarity and accuracy. In short, building
the concept groundwork for a field of design research.
As I understand it, Clive used the term 'design' in the paper in ways
that frequently conflated the 'doing of designing' with researching. This
he then used, via the idea that 'design is research', to a not very justifiabl
e direct comparison between 'design', scientific research and humanities
research. Not only is this epistemologically dodgy, his position would
be at odds I suspect with that of many practicing designers who are clear
about these differences. For example, many engineering designers are
very clear about the differences between undertaking scientific research
and designing (e.g. there is clarity ithat researching new theory about
the hydrodynamics of bearings is primary scientific research, and is different
from designing in which such a bearing is used in a mechanism). Similar
examples are found with respect to social system designers, e-commerce
system designers, information system designers, architects and other designers.
For some of these, substitute Humanities research for Science research.
On this basis, I suspect Clive's paper would be difficult to use as directly
as a foundation for PhD research, though the ideas can form the basis
for many new pathways of investigation.
I feel the design research discourse has moved on substantially as a result
of the Ohio and La Clusaz conferences and the work of contributors such
as Clive. The upshot is that much of the theory and analyses that were
presented in these conferences is now out of date. It's probably time
for another conference . . .
Best regards,
Terry
_________________________
Dr Terence Love
We-B Research Centre
Edith Cowan University
Perth, Western Australia 6018
Tel & Fax: +61 (0)8 9305 7629
Email: [log in to unmask]
+61 (0)8 9273 8682
_________________________
========================================
From: Rosan Chow <[log in to unmask]>
To: Internet Mail::[[log in to unmask]]
Subject: Dilnot's article
Date: 5/1/02 10:43 AM
hello all
i must have sold clive's article quite well since i received quite a
number of queries about it. for those who are interested, you can
actually download it from the phd-design mailing list @
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/phd-design/files/dilnot.rtf
it is in the Proceedings of the Ohio conference on Ph.D. education in
Design, Columbus, Ohio 1998.
--
Rosan Chow
Sessional Instructor
University of Alberta
Department of Art and Design
3-98 Fine Arts Building
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6G 2C9
Tel:1-780-492-7877
Fax: 1-780-492-7870
|