Dear Pip,

Thanks for your note on research requests. The customs surrounding
research requests vary field by field. Our research culture is still
young, and we do not have a well-established practice. I will give my
view on the way that research requests can improve design research
and doctoral research in design.

You are right to note that a research request is no substitute for a
literature search. I did not intend to suggest that it is. Rather,
the research request serves goals that the literature search cannot.

Since there is no way to know in reading a request whether anyone has
done a search or what he has found, it's always up to the person who
asks. Each researcher is free to decide how - and when - to post a
research request.

The main agreement across all fields is that a research request ought
to yield information back to the community of researchers where the
request has been posted. This is one way that a research request is
better for a field than a literature search.

If Noam does a quiet literature search for his current project, he
has no obligation to share what he learns. If he posts a research
request, he is obliged to share what he learns. Researchers often add
their own original findings to what list members send them in their
posted report. Beyond what he shares on the list, though, Noam also
makes himself known to us as someone working in a specific area. This
makes the rest of us aware that we can turn to Noam to help us in our
research on these issues.

One of the challenges of an interdisciplinary field such as ours is
that even a diligent search will often fail to uncover rich sources
of information and literature.

Beyond this, the slow development of methods training and
methodological awareness across he the several fields of design
research has an important consequence for individual researchers. In
older fields, longer development and deeper collective experience
mean a high rate of knowledge transfer and shared expertise among
scholars. In some fields, most universities have several departments
where a student can ask certain kinds of questions and get guidance
simply by walking across the hall or around the campus. Where a
better-established field would provide people with on-site staff
expertise for basic steps, our field is still learning what the steps
are and our researchers are learning where - and how - to ask.

I encourage research requests as a knowledge development and
knowledge transfer mechanism. Scholars who report out the cumulative
response help to share knowledge and they help us to build the field,
even when their subject is not close to our own.

A research requests becomes more than a way to identify literature.
It is a way to locate and identify people with expertise, and a way
to bring them together into identifiable communities or
sub-communities of expertise.

While beginning researchers sometimes abuse the research request,
this is rare. The one exception is the case of lists that experience
a sudden influx of undergraduates or beginning master's students
whose instructors have told them to join a list without teaching them
the basics of netiquette.

The various design research lists have a low volume of research
requests in proportion to aggregate list population compared to
research lists in such fields as management, communication,
information studies, information science, or other fields.

As I see it, we ought to welcome research requests, work actively to
support them (I'm sending notes to Noam), and enjoy the resulting
compilations that return to us as we grow the field.

Best regards,

Ken


--snip--

Maybe I'm not familiar with list etiquette but it seems to me that a
research request for citations etc should be a last resort and builds
upon the normal literature search process and should not replace it.

We are going to get a bit fed up when individuals post requests for
citations and relevant literature about subjects where there is a huge
amount of stuff readily available.

Philippa Ashton

--snip--

--

Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management

Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University