Dear Ken,

I think that Keith is not wrong when he suggests that your original statement leads to a tautology (Keith interprets your claim as : "all research reports are research reports and all artifacts are artifacts.").

You wrote in your last mail:
>Many designers have made the claim that an artifact can serve as a
>complete research result. This also applies to the often-repeated
>claim that an artifact, a designed object, or a painting can be, in
>itself, a doctoral dissertation, or thesis without supporting text.
>Since a PhD dissertation is a complete research report, it must by
>logical deduction, meet all demands of any other independent research
>result.
If I go back to your long and explicit post "Further notes following off-list dialogue" (March 23 2002), you do indeed describe (with talent and conviction) what is the current structure of a prototypical textual document called "Research report" as it is codified for the delivery of a PhD in most Universities.
I don't think that anyone here seems to consider that you can map on a one to one basis the text on one single object (but I suppose that you would admit some flexibility here, because the criteria can be easily reversed and we should reject with the same rigor any -verbal- description for it is not the object).

But the criterias that you set say little :
€ about the substance : e.g.: whether there is research besides documentation, but lets consider that there is,
€ about the textual format : e.g.: the relevance to research of the metanarrative(s) that is likely to constitute the substance of the points "2.Discussing the knowledge in the field to date" and "3. Discussing past attempts to examine or solve the problem" -KF-
and which  hermeneutical approach(es) is(are) valid -to state an important issue- when reporting about text, descriptions or artifacts.
€ about research-as-a-text, 1. because (but I think that you mean it yourself?) the substance of research is not to produce a report on research but to propose; 2. because I don't see any reason to believe that a -research- report is self explanatory (and it seems to me that a substancial body of semiotics tends to deal with this idea).

>The idea of an artifact that conveys or explains research results
>without using alphanumeric symbols or words is a contradiction in
>terms. Words may be conveyed without being written: a person can
>report research without paper, but a person is not an artifact.
>
To take it at a slightly more general level, my impression (but I might misread you) is that you deny a priori that an artifact can constitute a text, because it is a thing.
Let's know imagine the following : you have, in your hands, a book in an unknown alphabet, of which you know the script, and maybe a small lexicon. You will easily recognize it as a text, but, unless you make a significant number of inferences, it will remain to you as a thing (don't laugh, some people are indeed confronted exactly to this kind of situation).

This is just to say that the notion of self-explanatory (in the sense that you seem to assign to the notion of self-explanation : has the potential to constitute a text) is either globally invalid (fine with me), or, if valid, would probably require some knowledge about items that belong to the same category (the category being culturally bounded, or contextually defined).
The constitution of the category is probably the beginning of "the text" (and thus of the self-explanation) because it is "differentiation made tangible" (unless we are in a mental tabula rasa). But I do not suggest here that all the world must be present at once to make me sense the difference (as a viewer/reader). If we admit that we have some past -even heterogeneous- knowledge (as much as one must have some knowledge of english AND design AND PhD AND academia to make sense of the debate and this post), then I would think twice about the fact that ANY form might be mapped onto a formal language, and would have the potential of constituting a text. (Note that I am not saying "thing" or artifact, but form in the sense of a -single- entity constituted of parts -from the observer point of view- the relation(s) of the part(s) to each other and to the whole being the subject of the text -or the representation).

>If no one claims the prize by September 1, 2002, I will declare
>publicly that an artifact cannot in itself function as a complete
>research result, and I will explain why. I intend also to state that
>none of the scholars, researchers, or designers who has made this
>claim in the past has been able to substantiate their claim with
>reasoned argument.
1/ Are you sure that those who made the claim were using the same set of criterias as those you have listed?
2/ You might consider adding to "complete research result" something like "as predominantly defined in various scientific fields of research (e.g.:Š) for the delivery of a PhD".

BTW, to add to the list of the works that I mentionned last time, you might take also a look at the project "La caffetiera e Pulcinella" by Dalisi. Not uninteresting. I don't think that it enters the challenge, but to me it fulfills quite many criteriasŠ

Regards,

Jean

Jean Schneider
Monplaisir / 09700 Montaut / France.
Phone : (+33-0)5 61 69 21 44 / mob : (+33-0)661 350 357