Dear Ken,

unbelievable, how you can produce this long post in such a short time!

Sorry for this meta-reply, but I am in a hurry. Leaving for a long 
Berlinale night, have to read your post more thorougly later.

Jonas

__________




At 18.56 Uhr +0100 17/02/2006, Ken Friedman wrote:
>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]