Terence,
I agree with most of your comments. I believe that there are some differences between the type of research commonly undertaken in the US and in Australia with connection to product development. Companies here tend to have bigger budgets which is one of the reasons I moved from Australia to the United States.
Many of the companies which I have worked with here on Reseach projects such as HP and Haworth have been interested in both fresh data collection and locating existing data. But they wanted the fresh data collection to be limited in order to guide an otherwise uninformed design process and to be as cost effective and concurrent as possible. I believe that usefull information can be obtained even with a limited sample if the sample is chosen carefully.
The survey of job advertisements which I made I think does give some limited usefull data to guide curriculum development and took no longer than an hour to put together. It would be more usefull with 1000 advertisements instead of 100 but the fact that they mentioned only a few types of software in the ads gives some validation to the fact that we are currently teaching the same software at CCS and not other types.
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R o b C u r e d a l e
Chair Product Design
College for Creative Studies Detroit
201 East Kirby
Detroit MI 48202-4034
Phone: 313 664 7625
Fax: 313 664 7620
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http://www.ccscad.edu
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>>> Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> 10/26/03 05:11 AM >>>
Dear Rob,
Your comments on academic research in real world situations fits with what I've seen over the last five years in Western Australia. Did a mini project at the We-bcentre at Edith Cowan University to size up how we could make money on research. I remember four key issues came up:
* Timelines for 'official' academic research were way too slow for most industry (this was in the dot com boom and the main research focus was e-business/ knowledge management etc). The idea of spending a year submitting for government research funding and then three years on doctoral research was laughable when businesses wanted an answer in three weeks. Since then its obvious that these sorts of time delays limit the role of academic research in in a wide variety of businesses.
* Academic researchers were simply not fast enough compared to skilled commercial researchers, and often did not produce research output of sufficient quality. There are many institutional and motivational reasons that could explain these differences.
* It is nowadays more important to locate existing relvant data, information or analyses, rather than get involved in data gathering. The idea that "research = data collection" is no longer very useful or relevant, There is an enormous amount of data already available. Much of it has already been pre-processed - in some cases all the way to well established research findings! Secondary or meta- analysis of exisiting data or information is several orders more efficient than gathering new data. Its important the data/information is solid, unambigous, reliable, well validated and not tainted by unexplained bias. The idea is to build on the research of others. Self-report research is problematic for other researchers.
* Quick and dirty research requires enormous commitment and intellectual cirtical effort to identify what can be justifiably inferred from the data. Otherwise costs of making faulty decisions can greatly outweigh the savings from cheap data collection. Getting good outcomes from quick and dirty research can sometimes be much improved by practical specialists at the philosophical end of research methodology/critical thinking/ theory of knowledge.
I very much agree with you that we need improved research methods in design fields. I suspect many of these quicker methods are already availble in mental toolboxes of people who need to get relaible empirical answers fast. It would be useful to collect them together. There also seems to be a class of research methods specific to what I've called "design-focused research" . These "design-focuised research methods" appear to be epistemologically different from traditional classes of research methods. I welcome any thoughts on collecting together relaible and fast research methods for use during design activity.
Best wishes,
Terry
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Dr. Terence Love
Love Design and Research
PO Box 226
Quinns Rocks WA 6030
Tel/fax +61 (0)8 9305 7629
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www.love.com.au
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Dept of Design
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Curtin University
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