Dear Gunnar and Karel,
Karel makes the point, so I'll just add a me-too on this. I am
certain that we would be able to find more examples with a careful
literature search -- this is not the issue here. Gunnar asked if
known cases exist. Karel showed that they do. This is the case for
most fields of design practice.
The issue, as my post noted, is the challenge of bridging a
difference between research culture and professional guild culture.
And, as I noted, this is the same in many professions.
As for nay-saying, I'd propose that many of the things we prefer on
an artisanal basis nevertheless fail to meet client needs or end-user
needs. I much admire the work of a few graphic designers who develop
projects based on careful user testing, or on ideas they've tested at
one time or another. On occasion, I have heard other designers
criticize them on artistic grounds -- good designers, mind you, who
do beautiful work, but who refuse to acknowledge that solving a
client problem or meeting an end user need may actually be more
important than a startling or charming project. When I argue this
out, they'll agree from time to time that much of the work is useful
and serves the need, but they claim that even though this may be 95%
true, the artistic 5% makes the difference, even when what they see
as the artistic 5% competes with or makes the rest less usable. I'm
not going to give examples because I don't want to get into issues of
taste here. I don't want to accuse anyone of nay-saying. I want to
say that the problem exists. Each of us must reflect on this in his
or her own way.
Gunnar's post does call for two mild challenges. I did not present
the case of the Challenger as an example of ground-breaking research.
It was an explicit example of the kind of problem I raised in my
post. This involved basic principles that everyone understood based
on research done long ago. NASA overlooked clear risks and permitted
a launch despite warnings, and then attempted to draw attention away
from a simple problem. You do not need to be a Nobel laureate to
recognize that, and Feynman did not get the prize for solving that
problem. He acted as a citizen ought to do in drawing attention to an
issue other members of the commission were willing to overlook.
Following a careful examination of the problem, Feynman (2001:
151-169) wrote a minority report that NASA tried to quash. You can
read the story in James Gleick's (1992: 415-428) biography.
On the seventeen-year lag, there is a huge difference between
seventeen months and seventeen years. The problems I discuss are
problems that do not generally rely on shifting sands research, but
on carefully constructed clinical trials and frequently on massive
meta-analysis of multiple trials. In many cases, this involves
evidence-based medicine (EBM).
To learn more about EBM, visit one of the good sites now available --
these are aimed at physicians and nurses, but lay readers can learn
something useful
http://library.umassmed.edu/EBM/index.cfm
http://www.cebm.utoronto.ca/
http://www.evidence-based-medicine.co.uk/
The last site has some good download materials for those who want to know.
If Gunnar agrees with me on hand-washing, he ought to agree that EBM
offers real advances based on massive clinical and statistical
evidence. Much EBM material also provides levels of confidence based
on an evaluation of the amount and kind of available evidence. Tjis
is not seventeen-month stuff that careful conservative physicians
ought properly to resist. It is hand-washing stuff, and the failure
to adopt these practices leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths
every year in the hospitals of advanced, wealthy nations.
If you want to learn more about what this means to real people whose
lives are at stake, spend a couple of hours on the web site of the
Institute for Health Improvement
http://www.ihi.org/ihi
Then ask yourself whether you'd rather go to a hospital that
implements EBM and follows the kinds of protocols that IHI recommends
-- or whether you'd rather trust your life to a physician who prefers
waiting eighteen years to make sure that your treatment is
conservative enough. This also applies to people who go to hospital
for ordinary, easily treated health problems and die there because of
hospital-generated illnesses totally unrelated to the initial health
problem.
For those who don't want to read all the EBM literature or even as
much as I've provided, Wikipedia has a pretty good overview piece.
There is also a link to evidence-based design, a practice that David
Durling has been advocating for several years. That's the kind of
thing Karel does.
Warm wishes,
Ken
--
References
Feynman, Richard P. 2001. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. London:
Penguin Books.
Gleick, James P. 1992. Genius. Richard Feynman and Modern Physics.
London: Abacus.
--
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]
|