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Dear Eun-jong,
Been thinking about your post. These issues affect kinds of research
that all fields of professional practice.
A recent book explores this issue with proposals for ways to make
research more effective in the world of professional practice. This
is Andrew van de Ven's (2007) Engaged Scholarship. A few years back,
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton (1999) wrote on this in The
Knowing-Doing Gap. These are management scholars, but the issues and
problems are the same, and different fields of design research can
use many of van de Ven's proposals exactly as they are. (While he
teaches in a business school, van de Ven's field is information
systems, a subject that might be taught in any other number of
schools, design schools among them.)
But the problem here is double-sided. Much research goes unused
because practicing professionals simply don't want to use it. They
know what they like, they've built a world of professional practice
in which they are comfortable, and they learn their profession in the
highly conservative guild tradition that guides much of the culture
in art and design.
Buckminster Fuller -- as designer and architect -- frequently noted
the quarter-century gap between developments in research and their
application in practice. It affects industry and it affects design
practice. It also affects other fields such as medicine. This, in
fact, is one of the major challenges to the spread of evidence-based
medicine.
The Committee on Quality of Health Care in America (2001: 13) found
that it usually takes seventeen years for physicians and hospitals to
adopt and put into practice the medical advances determined in
clinical trials. Even when they do, practical application tends to be
uneven. (See also Balas and Boren, 2000). For that matter, some
research-based practices STILL find uneven application decades after
we have acknowledge them as central to good medical practice. For
example, the failure of hospitals and physicians to carefully and
rigorously apply basic hand-washing hygiene before EVERY patient
contact is a perpetual problem (see, f.ex., Goldmann 2006). We've
known about this since Semmelweiss, Lister, and Pasteur pioneered the
practice of antiseptic medicine and developed germ theory between the
1840s and 1890s. And here we are looking at this yet again in 2007!
We all know this is a problem -- and physicians know this best of
all. We all of us, at least those of us on this list, would probably
agree that the solution is careful and comprehensive attention to
basic antiseptic procedures. Use the URL below to read this short,
informative article by Donald Goldmann (2006) if you disagree. You
can also follow the links to a few basic articles detailing simple
applications based on more than a century and a half of research.
My point is that we are looking at a problem where professionals
refuse to apply research findings to professional practice even
though these findings are not in dispute. Everyone agrees that the
research findings are valid and important, and most of us know that
fatalities commonly occur because medical staff do not wash their
hands before every patient contact.
The gap between research and practice does not occur because the
research is irrelevant. It occurs because some physicians behave as
physicians behaved when they made grand rounds in the 1840s, back
when Ignaz Semmelweiss was a medical student.
Van de Ven shows us ways to bridge the gap between research and
practice by creating relevant research in engaged scholarship. But
designers and architects, as well as physicians and rocket scientists
all neglect what research suggests or predicts. (Yes, even rocket
scientists: remember Richard Feynman and the Challenger?)
On the one hand, I'd agree that we ought to consider the need for
relevant research. On the other, I'll argue that we face a
significant problem in a guild-based profession where -- like
medicine, law, and engineering -- people seem to believe that
research is irrelevant if it produces findings that they did not
learn about in school. In some cases, professional practitioners even
seem to neglect research that produced results a century before they
were born.
In design, of course, we have several intriguing challenges. The
first is that there are relatively few things in design that we can
determine with the precision of physics or the massive statistical
certainty of evidence-based medicine. If there were, however, someone
would doubtless argue against it on grounds of personal preference,
artistic freedom, or a general appeal to postmodern epistemology.
Our second challenge is that a great many people see design practice
as an art form: they do not want relevant research precisely because
it offers challenges to the practice that they prefer. In
communications design, for example, some simple rules of thumb that
are based on studies of human physical perception and cognitive
capacity should guide certain aspects of professional practice.
Despite this fact, I have often observed designers argue about
applying these findings to teaching or to work, claiming that the
research is irrelevant.
Our third challenge is a lack of tolerance for the slow development
of knowledge. There is sometimes good reason to examine problems or
develop research that does not have immediate relevance. Design is an
important field of human discovery and invention, a field that grows
increasingly important in a world where daily reality is shaped by
human-designed artifacts of all kinds, social, technical, physical,
and digital. To exactly the degree that this is so, we require free
research of the kind that has helped us to make advances in such
fields as rocket science, law, and medicine -- when practitioners
choose to apply what researchers have learned.
So I'd say that we need to find ways to make research relevant. And
I'd say that there are times when it is important to learn things
that may not seem relevant when we learn them.
Best regards,
Ken
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References
Balas, E. Andrew, and Suzanne A.Boren. 2000. "Managing Clinical
Knowledge for Health Care Improvement." Yearbook of Medical
Informatics. Bethesda, MD: National Library of Medicine, pp. 65-70,
2000.
Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, Institute of
Medicine. 2001. Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for
the 21st Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
Goldmann, Donald. 2006. "System Failure versus Personal
Accountability -- the Case for Clean Hands." The New England Journal
of Medicine, Vol. 355, No. 2, July 13 2006, pp. 121-123. Available
online at URL: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/2/121
Pfeffer, Jeffrey and Robert I Sutton. 1999. The Knowing-Doing Gap:
How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press.
Van De Ven, Andrew H. 2007. Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for
Organizational and Social Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
--
Eun-jong Lee wrote:
I'm research in bridging between design research and industrial
design practice.
I have worked with industry for long times and I found that the
people in industry skeptical to relate design research and design
practice.
When I refer to the term 'design practice' it doesn't means all the
designers in the industry but I mean the design practitioner who
engages in embodiment directly, traditional designer. Most of this
kind of designers thinks that design research doesn't effect on them
directly and there exist huge chasm between design research and
design practice. Actually design researchers don't have much
knowledge of design practice. As Schon said, it seems that there is
nothing here to guide practitioners who wish to gain a better
understanding of the practical uses and limits of research- based
knowledge, or to help scholars who wish to take a new view of
professional action. Is it really impossible to cross this chasm?
If you know any research related to this research or any comment,
please let me know.
--
--
Ken Friedman
Professor
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management
Oslo
Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School
Copenhagen
+47 46.41.06.76 Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat
email: [log in to unmask]
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