My goodness, things get so personal so fast around here.

Regardless...

Design does not have a monopoly on research not being widely cited or
ucsed by practitioners or researchers not always being away of the most
pertinent issues of practice.  Researchers in the engineering and business
space have been struggling with this issue for eons. (Okay, maybe not that
long but a long time)  We beg people from industry to come to our
conferences, offering plenary speaker positions and complimentary tote
bags.  On one instance I recal a senior mechanical engineering professor
openly ranting to Siemens (the largest funder of his research) regarding
their lack of adoption of his brilliant insights.  He continued the rant
by pointing out that Siemens was relying on technology that was almost a
century old, denying themselves the performance gain enabled by the
efforts of the denizens of the ivory tower.  The professor was correct,
they could improve their performance by adopting his reseach
findings.  The point the professor missed was the cost of adoption for
Siemens.  For Siemens to adopt these new methods and technology, the
installation technicians would require PhD's, the economics of which are
not solvent.

You hear similar stories from boths sides of the fence, research and
practice. The challenge is that as researcher, it is easy for us to
perceive the usefulness of our efforts and see applications everywhere.  
(The proverbial "everything looks like a nail.")  The good and bad thing
about this is that many times our audience (practitioners and other
researchers) do not appreciate our advice or cannot afford the costs of
time, or money, or performance impact the make the changes we might be
advocating.  I've heard so many people engaged in conversations, "If you
would only.... then all...."  

There seems to be two significant issues inhibiting the cross pollenation
between research and practice.
1) Cost of Adoption
2) Awareness of research, both within design and other fields

I've already given examples regarding the cost of adoption and the lack of
awareness by some researchers the overall implications of what they are
proposing.  What if we were to DESIGN our research to lower the cost of
adoption?  Imagine using our findings on OURSELVES to understand the
practitioner as a user and exploring the implications of intentionally
designing the dissemination of results in such a fashion to minimize the
cost of adoption of whatever tools and methods we may be advocating. I
feel that going through this process will also help the researcher
understand where their results might have the most impact.  I think it
would surprise Anne-Marie more to see her journal cited in the Journal of
Mechanical Design in an article regarding optimizing the design of the
profile of gear teeth than maybe the lack of adoption in the arenas she
considers her home turf.  This notion of designing research results may be
an old idea in your particular subfield, but it seems pertinent in the
engineering design domain.  We have relied for so long on the channel of
journal articles and research conferences.  These channels have become the
main metrics of academic promotion, assuming that publication directly
leads to broad dissemination and adoption.  We should challenge these
assumptions if the end goal is really adoption.

I believe the awareness piece is more challenging.  Each researcher can
take responsibility for examinging the cost of adoption of their research
results, while the issue of awareness takes the efforts of the entire
community and/or communities.  I recall the title of Hilary Clinton's book
on children, "It Takes a Village."  The same is true with the
awareness.  Rosan's work on ICT may or may not have application to my
daily work of designing MEMS sensors.  My immediate assumption is that her
results could impact the design of a user interface for one of the
products we are contemplating but may have little to do with what method I
design to mechanically couple the sensor to the target system.  We can
help each other out by understanding the bounds of what our research
focuses on within the subfields of design rather than, in the interest of
trying to find commonality in all things, discussing design always at the
abstract.  Moving from the depth of our research application area to
high level discussion of Design with a capital D without couching our
discussion with the perspective or subfield we are coming from creates
confusion on language and misunderstandings surrounding overapplication of
particular viewpoints.  The abstract insight from one field may be
entirely correct within that application area but may not transfer
effectively into another context.  During these discussions some list
members become dogmatic about their positions, knowing in their heart and
soul they are correct.  And they are for their context.  Those opposing
these positions may be equally dogmatic regarding their view of the design
truth.  And they are correct for their context as well.  It is rare that
the "truths" we discover or craft during our research are true for all
cases.  That does not make them any less true or less valuable.

So, if we can begin to address the awareness and cost of adoption issues
within this group, I believe this will better equip us in our design
evangelism with practitioners and researchers alike.

Back to (engineering) design practice...

John

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Gunnar Swanson wrote:

> On Oct 7, 2004, at 12:15 AM, Rosan Chow wrote:
> > when i read your previous post, i doubted if the design researchers 
> > you know
> > and criticize are the same as the ones i know. for one thing, i 
> > ignorantly have
> > not heard of 'wallpaper' and 'metroplis'. and the design researchers 
> > whom i am
> 
> Rosan,
> 
> I have no idea what sort of research you do and what it has to do with 
> what sort of design. Maybe there's no professional reason you would 
> have heard Wallpaper or Metropolis (or Eye or Emigre or. . .) but 
> there's a fair amount of consternation expressed on this list that 
> working designers don't go way out of their way to sort through a large 
> amount of uninteresting and widely-dispersed material to find the small 
> percentage of useful-to-them research. I wonder how many design 
> researchers have no connection with designers, the design fields, or 
> the culture(s) of design.
> 
> Gunnar
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