Dear Jonas,

Thanks for your reply. I'm not quite sure who "we" are. Design is an 
activity and a process. People in several hundred fields and 
sub-fields practice design and design research. When we asked 
reviewers on the Wonderground scientific committee to provide 
unprompted  key words to describe their research fields -- that is, 
each person  provided five or six key words chosen freely without any 
suggestions from us -- they offered over 500 different key words, 
each representing a specific field. I find it hard to argue  that 
"they" in all those fields are somehow colonizing "us."

The design-based research community is using the design process in a 
more articulate way than prior researchers. But gosh, Jonas. Long 
before I got my PhD in 1976 people spoke of "research design." That 
is the art and skill of designing a research project. The problem 
with much research design was that researchers  often failed to use 
the full array of design tools in iterative  improvements. Well, 
actually, some did this in practice while  pretending in theory that 
everything in their research design was designed in advance. The 
design-based research people acknowledge the role of iterative 
improvements in research by using the label, "design-based research."

I'll grant Alain Findeli has addressed these issues. (I don't think 
Frayling did, though. He created a label but he never described the 
process. The label was a maladapted version of a concept that 
Herbert Read created for art and art education, not for research. In 
the decade or so since he first used the rubric, Frayling has never 
gotten round to explaining it, though he did once suggest that 
perhaps it was more a fleeting thought than a realizable term.)

You're right -- at least partly right -- to say that " 
'research-based design' isn't really design-specific. Any activity 
can be research-based."

And THAT is David's point. He is arguing that design research MUST be 
research based. Design research is ALREADY design specific. The 
problem is weak research.

The notion of "practice based research" is not design-specific 
either.  People in a dozen fields are using it to get around the fact 
that they want to practice -- music, art, design, performance -- and 
because they are working in universities, they want to be able to 
call what they do "research" to meet the internal political 
priorities of the university in the context of education funding in 
today's Europe.

Let's forget funding politics and get to the deeper issue.

This deeper issue involves how we frame and conceptualize our 
activities in design research.

"I wonder why nobody ever seems to use a term like 'research-based 
(or -led) design'. This might connote an area of design where the 
design  project is constructed specifically as systematic 
investigative practice,  with the intention of producing research 
results. It might also come to  mean design that is evidence based, 
or otherwise based upon the results  of research."

Chris caught that issue, and he responded on the topic of 
meta-inquiry.  He found a 33-word statement on one of the 
research-based design  web sites, describing their meta-inquiry:

"The authors argue that design-based research, which blends empirical 
educational research with the theory-driven design of learning 
environments,  is an important methodology for understanding how, 
when, and why  educational innovations work in practice" 
(Design-Based Research  Collective 2003, quoted by Chris Rust).

Of course, the design-based research people value research. Their 
position seems relatively close to David's position.

This is a contrast with the several flavors of "practice-based 
research" that don't have much (or any) research. This includes two 
common misunderstandings. The first is that if there is something 
labeled "practice-led research," then from this it follows that 
"practice is  research." The second common misunderstanding is that 
since we document research, if we document practice, the act of 
documenting practice transforms documented practice into research.

Part of this recurring debate arises from a quest to restore what 
some  people believe is an inappropriate balance between practice and 
research in the context of the research university. (Few people found 
anything amiss when art and design departments discriminated against 
people with research degrees on the grounds that these were fields of 
professional practice with no need for research. That's a story for 
another day.)

The issue of colonization just never occurred to me. To the contrary, 
it seems to me that many design practitioners are trying to colonzie 
or take on the rubric of research because research has standing  in 
universities that are research institutions. The effort to use 
confusing  terms often seems like an attempt to reclassify design 
practice as a  form of research, shifting the political balance of 
research, perhaps  transforming parts of the research university back 
into polytechnics  or into quasi-independent departments that 
resemble the former  schools of art and design.

I'm glad you posted the full answers to John Chris's ten questions. 
Some of the editing in Mind the Gap was unclear. It would have been 
helpful for the editors to make clear what they changed in what the 
authors wrote, at least to let us know when a major text was trimmed 
significantly or even omitted. This doesn't change the main point.

Design-based research is a legitimate response to important research 
questions by people who work in an applied field, education. 
Education is a design field, much as engineering, law, and medicine 
are design fields. While industrial design and graphic design are 
also design fields, I'd argue that educators have been in the design 
business far longer than industrial designers. I can't see that they 
are colonizing us  any more than we are colonizing other fields when 
we use terms  they have long used .... like "research design."

David makes another point, also useful. He argues that design 
research must be research-based. That may seem like a tautology, but 
it is not in a situation where "practice-based research" advocates 
sometimes  believe that a picture of a thing (or the thing itself) is 
a research report

This is NOT an argument against the concept of practice-led research. 
We debated all this back in the "Picasso's PhD" debate, and I think 
we concluded that practice-led research offered important 
opportunities to design research as long as it involve research- 
based practice.

For that matter, this led to some important inquiries in design 
research: witness the research exhibition that will take place at 
Wondeground! in Lisbon this November.

And with that, I will confess -- to my shame -- that I owe Eduardo 
and Martim some manuscripts. Eduardo has rebuked me severely for 
spending time on the list when I should be spending time on Lisbon. 
Shameless as I am, I have been posting. Bhut now Martim has 
threatened that he will not cook for me when I return to Lisbon. This 
is a severe situation, so I will withdraw from this thread until I 
have fulfilled my responsibilities.

Yours,

Ken

p.s. Rosan, Thanks for your answer. This was a clear answer. I will 
reflect, and I hope to respond after a while.


Jonas wrote:

I am really surprised: shouldn't WE claim ownership of the concept of 
"design-based research"? This is again what Klaus (and others) call 
the  colonization of our field. We observe how others (mis-) use the 
concept of  design.

So much has been done on OUR side to argue for design-driven 
inquiry: project-based research (Findeli), research through design 
(Frayling),  the design way (Nelson / Stolterman), etc. This is 
exactly what I see as  design-based research.

In my own words:

The Scientific Paradigm has to be embedded into the Design Paradigm:
- research is guided through design process logic, and
- design is supported by phases of scientific research and inquiry.

The other way round: "research-based design" isn't really 
design-specific. Any activity can be research-based.


-- 

Ken Friedman
Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management

Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School

+47 46.41.06.76    Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95    Tlf Privat

email: [log in to unmask]