Hi Ken,

Sometimes the hairs are not really what we think they are.
My stepson once looking at his grandmother's hair proclaimed: "Now I
understand: Hairs are born white and THEN become brown!"
Loved your post,
Cheers,
Eduardo
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Friedman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 12:27 PM
Subject: Splitting Hairs


> Friends,
>
> One of the kinds of comment that occasionally goes round in design
> research circles is the description of other peoples' research or the
> conversations about it as splitting hairs. I'm going to challenge that to
> suggest that we may not be splitting enough hairs.
>
> Now it's clear that we can cover the entire field on a single list with
> only 1350 subscribers -- and if we could, we would not be able to cover
> any range of issues in depth. Even the largest list in our field has far
> fewer subscribers than the field as a whole. While Design Research News
> has over 8,000 subscribers, and I estimate that it should be far larger to
> cover the field.
>
> It matters because there is an inherent tension between size, breadth of
> coverage, and depth. DRN comes once a month with broad coverage at a level
> that makes it accessible to all readers. PhD-Design operates in
> asynchronous but real time whenever anyone wishes to post. To exactly the
> degree that we dig into an issue, it will seem deep and rich to some while
> other criticize it as finicky hairsplitting.
>
> This leads me to two reflections.
>
> Reflection one concerns the PhD-Design list. From time to time, I get
> notes about the list from people asking questions or making comments on a
> thread. Some say that they love the list -- it gives them an opportunity
> to sample the field, make connections, following a broader conversation
> than they get at their own university or design firm. Even if their school
> or firm is good, it can never be as broad as the community of 1,350 who
> meet here. As I travel around, I find that people use the list in their
> own research and teaching, they save informative and thoughtful notes to
> share with students and colleagues, and they like the added perspective it
> affords them. I don't actually deserve all the nice notes I get. The list
> owners are Keith Russell and David Durling. They built the list after the
> Ohio conference on doctoral education in design, and they keep it going.
> Obviously, I am active here, and I work with them sometimes on
> list-related projects. This included redirecting traffic to this list and
> expanding the list after we held a highly successful on-line debate on
> another list while getting ready for the La Clusaz conference on doctoral
> education in design. The truth is that many of the subscribers here
> deserve kudos for a list that has evolved and grown over the past decade.
>
> Many people post astonishing material here, generous collections of
> resources, valuable ideas, and often useful reflections. If I were to
> describe them all and thank everyone from whom I have learned something
> new and useful, this would be a long post. What I like about this list
> (debates included) is that I learn as much from people who challenge my
> views as from those who agree with me, as well as learning from people who
> amend and amplify my views by way of divergent agreements.
>
> And this leads to me second reflection on splitting hairs.
>
> Fields grow when lots of intelligent people gather to split hairs. I've
> been immersed in two books on wealth and economic growth. One dates back
> to a couple of ideas that Adam Smith first stated nearly two and a half
> centuries ago. One idea has had much traction among economists, the idea
> of the invisible hand. From this has grown the economics of diminishing
> returns or constant returns in equilibrium. The other idea is stated in
> Smith's model of the pin factory. Despite the fact that this is the first
> and most widely known statement of the economic advantages of effective
> organization design, economists have long overlooked the fact that this
> also states the issue of increasing returns. This is a problem that
> economists long had difficulties addressing, and it wasn't until the
> twentieth century that people were even able to state it as a growth
> problem of increasing returns. Even then, it was not until the last two
> decades that people began finding ways to work with the problem, rendering
> it tractable.
>
> Part of the process has involved -- for want of a better term --
> splitting hairs. This involves defining fields; locating the boundaries of
> problems and problem issues; seeing where models created for other
> problems afforded equivalent terms that could then be applied to the
> problem of increasing returns; finding out why the problem yields more
> answers with one set of labels than another. The field of economics makes
> progress, slow progress, but progress, because several hundred thousand
> extremely intelligent people have been willing to work patiently at the
> many aspects of progressive science: splitting hairs, solving puzzles,
> and -- sometimes --
> finding ways to shift position or paradigm for a new run at a problem that
> did not yield answers to old approaches.
>
> Several years back, Pekka Korvenmaa and Jan Verwijnen organized a
> conference in Helsinki where they invited Tore Kristensen to speak on
> design research. Tore summarized the key aspects of fields with
> progressive research programs. Such programs, he said,
>
> 1. Build a body of generalized knowledge.
> 2. Improve problem solving capacity.
> 3. Generalize knowledge into new areas.
> 4. Identify value creation and cost effects.
> 5. Explain differences in design strategies and their risks or benefits,
> 6. Learn on the individual level.
> 7. Learn on the collective learning.
> 8. Develop meta-learning.
>
> (Kristensen 1999; Friedman 2001)
>
> At several points in this virtuous cycle, researchers in fields that make
> progress take time to split hairs -- they compare models, they check their
> models against empirical data, they clarify terms and definitions, they
> see why one set of definitions may afford greater traction than another.
> This is often slow, difficult work, and --
> rather like evolutionary cycles of punctuated equilibrium -- one may go
> for years on a corner of a problem before learning enough to contribute a
> few thoughts that break things open in dramatic ways for another part of
> the field.
>
> We're just starting to get that kind of development in design research.
> Our problem is that we still have too few people meeting to split hairs,
> too few people willing to enroll in the long, developmental program that
> leads to new ideas that breath life into potentially visionary scenarios.
>
> So I say good on you to anyone with the patience to work through a
> problem, to follow a thread, contribute to a dialogue in a way that helps
> to unpack and understand more than we know and understand today.
>
> Participating in a discussion list is not the same as writing a journal
> article or a monograph -- but it should not be. It is an opportunity to
> throw out a quick thought or even an elaborated idea at an asynchronous
> seminar with some of the most interesting people in our field. Can we do
> better? Probably. As we do, there will be many hairs to split. I do not
> see this as a detrimental factor, but rather as one aspect of the slow
> development every field goes through in the process of individual
> learning, collective learning, and meta-learning.
>
> Warm wishes,
>
> Ken
>
>
> References
>
> Friedman, Ken. 2001. "Creating Design Knowledge: From Research into
> Practice." In Design and Technology Educational Research and Development:
> The Emerging International Research Agenda.
> E. W. L. Norman and P. H. Roberts, eds. Loughborough, UK: Department of
> Design and Technology, Loughborough University, 31-69.
>
> Kristensen, Tore. 1999. "Research on design in business." (Slides from
> conference keynote presentation.) Useful and Critical: Research in
> Design.Helsinki, Finland: University of Art and Design Helsinki UIAH.
>
> --
>
> 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]