Patrick and the rest of the list
I must preface what I say by making it clear, as I have in the past, that I
have a limited amount of time that I can devote to this and other lists. My
contributions tend to be limited and infrequent, though I do try to follow
the threads.
I was hoping that someone else would pick up on your interest in Normative
Design Research, but as this is your second request for help, perhaps I can
help in a small way.
First, by sharing with you some of my own experiences in this area as a
young graduate. In the mid sixties I began doing some research which was
normative in the sense you describe, and it was a very lonely business. I
wanted to work out better ways of designing information so that it was
understandable to people. This culmimated in an MSc thesis some ten years
later 'The Application of behavioural science to symbold design' (probably
still available from the dusty shelves at Durham University). As I said, it
was a lonely business. Neither the psychologists who supervised me, nor the
design educators I worked with knew or understood much about what I was
doing. In retrospect, the title says it all! Today it would be very obvious
to lots of people what I was working on and why. I suspect also that if I
went back and read the thesis today, I would feel great waves of
embarrasment at my naivete and ignorance, aswell as a strong intellectual
disagreement with the young upstart who wrote it. However, one thing does
linger on from that early work and that is a continuing commitment, despite
the difficulties, to normative research. I hope that is at least partially
reasuring.
Second, I recall getting very frustrated with the design methods literature
of the time. Although there was a substantial body of literature on
different methods, there was virtually none on the efficacy or comparative
advantages of one method over another; it was a kind of pluralistic mish
mash (dare I say, like a stamp collection).
Third, to find a way through, at least in my own area, I began to ask
questions about outcomes. I was working on public information symbols at the
time with the Australian Standards Association (Standards Australia, today).
Instead of the endless surveys that had been conducted to that point on an
ever proliferating collection of information symbols, we started to ask a
simple question: What do you want people to be able to do with any
particular symbol that they cannot do at the moment? It was extremely
difficult to get people to fous on that question, but once we did and got
some sensible answers, we could then plan how to develop test and modify a
symbol so that people could indeed do with it what we wanted them to do. The
methods for doing this type of design and testing are built into a number of
Australian Standards, and into some ISO standards. One of the lessons we
learnt from that was the importance of focusing on outcomes right at the
beginning. This enabled us to generate new or refined design methods, but
always against desired outcomes.
Fourth, I still find it a lonely business and most of the research I read is
still of little value in normative research.
David
--
Professor David Sless
BA MSc FRSA
Co-Chair Information Design Association
Senior Research Fellow Coventry University
Director
Communication Research Institute of Australia
** helping people communicate with people **
PO Box 398 Hawker
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