Friends,

Eduardo's note has much to recommend it. Eduardo is describing how we
shape design knowledge through pedagogy and experience. Under many
circumstances, however, this is not research but the same form of
knowledge transmission that guild masters have passed on to
apprentices for the past five millennia. While these have not all
been designers in the modern sense, the guild masters of many
disciplines were the industrial designers of their time. They were
certainly configurers and form givers. The lecture -- including the
studio apprentice lecture -- has worked for at least five thousand
years in such fields as architecture, painting, furniture making,
ceramics and clothing, along with other specialized industries. Many
of these industries have been the high technology industries of their
eras, and designers both planned, gave form, and manufactured --
manu-factured, made by hand or made through the hands of their
amanuenses and apprentices -- advanced industrial artifacts. The
designers who did this work included weapon smiths, sword smiths,
blackmiths, wheelwrights, chariot makers, boatwrights, naval
architects, watchmakers, and many more.

In this long era of human history, though, research took different
forms. The research of the guilds was secret knowledge, reserved to
guild members who took an oath of secrecy pledging their knowledge to
their guild and promising to reserve it to fellow guild members and
duly entered apprentices. The lecture was an acceptable way to
transmit research knowledge in an era when knowledge developed slowly
with decades or even centuries taking place between significant
innovations. Master saddle-makers were designing and producing
saddles by around 800 BC. It was six hundred years before the
earliest version of stirrups came into existence, and another five
hundred years before the first modern stirrup. Henry Petroski (1994)
describes the slow evolution of paper clips, zippers, forks in
historical times. Think of the documented evolutionary span of these
artifacts. Compare this with the undocumented evolutionary
development of artifacts for which we have only archeological records
or partial artifacts (cf. de Camp 1963). Innovation came slowly and
the goal of the guilds was to preserve knowledge and transmit it with
carefully benchmarked techniques across techniques. These techniques
were literally benchmarked -- guild practice and the use of marked
benches as templates to ensure accurate reproduction was the origin
of our modern verb, "to benchmark."

In this era, nearly all research was clinical. Some few rare examples
of applied research rose above the immediate clinical situation to
become guild books or books of house secrets. For a good example, see
Yagyu Munenori's house book in Musashi (1982) or some of the other
examples I present in Friedman (1997). In the era before print, the
only way to share research results involved lectures and hands-on
demonstrations or letters, notebooks, and sketchbooks. Letters,
notebooks, and sketchbooks allowed researchers to share applied
research -- research for use in classes of cases -- beyond an
immediate audience. Lectures and demonstrations permitted this, but
they were generally used for clinical situations -- immediate
examination and discovery.

With the advent of movable type and the modern research academies, a
new kind of research came into being. At first, this involved
publishing. Later, research came to require publishing. The reason
for the requirement is this: as communities of knowledge grew beyond
the confines of a single location, it became necessary to allow
researchers in many places to examine evidence, to ask questions, to
seek answers, and to propose solutions. The need to share ideas
widely remained central, even in fields that did not permit
replication. These fields include such professions as design, law, or
architecture, as well as such fields as philosophy, theology, and
history.

As the need for research grew while design school curricula continued
to reproduce guild knowledge, the lecture became even less a medium
or an artifact of design research than before. In the great era of
the guilds, the incremental, evolutionary growth of knowledge meant
that lectures were effective transmission media for research
knowledge -- clinical research in an era without transmission media
might increase the stock of knowledge by one half of one percent in
each generation. In times of rapid change, this might increase to one
percent a year.

This kind of one per cent per year growth in an applied professional
field is slow by today's standards, but still significant. The growth
of agricultural productivity increased European yields by roughly one
per cent per year for a century after the development of modern crop
rotation in the 16th century. This meant a doubling of yields, and a
massive increase in the ability of agriculture to support population
growth while food costs often dropped dramatically. But it is
important to observe that this 1% per year increase took place at the
same time that modern research practices brought about the
dissemination of information through journals, workshops, scientific
societies, learned societies, and associations. It overlapped the
development of the chrestomathic research university of the Humboldt
reforms, and was followed swiftly by the birth of the non-conforming
universities in the UK and the great universities of North America.
The pace of change grew so fast that slow one-to-one transmission no
longer worked. In the twentieth century, the development of changes
to received knowledge grew even faster. Lectures couldn't keep up as
a research artifact.

It is true that lectures continued to hold a place in research --
especially in academies and learned societies, but these took on a
formal quality, generally accompanied by written papers that allowed
anyone to follow from a distance.

In professional schools -- medical schools, law schools, business
schools, and design schools -- lectures now have a different form.
They transmit information and inculcate knowledge in young
practitioners, but they are not research artifacts. Medical journals
and law reviews publish research. Lectures, clinical rounds, and
cases teach students. In management schools and design schools,
lectures lag even farther behind. Medicine professors and law
professors are expected to follow research, even when they do not
contribute to research through publications, and their lectures are
research based. This is true in some business schools, but not all.
In most design schools, it is not the case. Many lecturers do not
follow the development of research: they teach based on personal
experience. Like guild masters and journeymen, they teach students to
internalize and reproduce professional behavior. Things have changed
since I first described this problem in the article where I describe
guild traditions (Friedman 1997). There are now many more designers
engaged in design research. Nevertheless, these are still a minority.
If the majority of design school lecturers do not conduct research,
it is hard to see how their lectures can be research artifacts.

What is changing dramatically is the interest in research, and what
is increasing dramatically is the number of excellent working design
who also conduct research. Their lectures can be research artifacts,
as Eduardo proposes. What is significant is that they also publish.
In some fields, researchers distinguish what we learn from what we
contribute to the knowledge of the field in the motto, "If it isn't
published, it isn't research."

There are three significant ideas in that saying. First, publish
research builds the collective knowledge of the field. Even though we
may conduct research to learn something for private use, the
assertion states that what we learn is not research until we share it.

Second, published research generally requires some form of peer
review. Our colleagues in a research field consider, debate, and
reflect on what we publish. Whether they are right or wrong in their
judgement, peer review ensures we are not speaking a private language
like the twin brothers who have cooked up a new string theory physics
that most researchers in physics look on as quackery. (Please, folks,
let's not get started on how Einstein was misunderstood. Einstein
_was_ misunderstood, but no one called him a crank, and he published
his controversial and debated articles in the leading physics journal
of his day. The twins describe their physics on TV shows and in
possibly fraudulent web sites with accolades by scholars no one can
find.)

Third, published research is open to challenge.

Lectures given to an audience of students fulfill none of these
criteria, especially when the only accredited professional in the
room is the teacher who gives the lecture. I've heard a lot of
nonsense at conferences in my life. At a conference session, though,
anyone is free to stand up and say, "that's rubbish," offering an
argument for the case against the speaker. When design teachers
lecture to a class, students are usually likely to accept what they
hear based on the authority of the teacher and the fact that a school
has assigned them to learn what the teacher says. When a student
questions the teacher's claims, the teacher may or may not give a
satisfactory answer. A student who rejects the teacher's answer and
disagrees is likely to meet the fate that most guilds meted out to
dissenting apprentices: rejection, often formal.

So I'm not disagreeing with Eduardo, but I do argue that he is right
in a limited number of cases. What I'd have to say is that our field
is so broad that all the good ideas here are right -- in a limited
number of cases. For any case of design research where something
works as a research artifact, there will be cases in which it does
not. Pluralism is necessary -- and desirable.

Two quick notes -- to be followed on another occasion -- design
knowledge may be the knowledge that we require to give form to the
things we design, but design research contributes to design knowledge
in many ways beyond informing design practice. I got a note today
from a distinguished scholar who works in design research who told me
that she hadn't joined the Design Research Society because she is not
a designer. I responded by noting that DRS is for design researcher.
Some are designers, some are not. Many, perhaps the majority, are
chartered designers, industrial designers, graphic designers, etc.,
and they also belong to the professional societies for design
practice. We also have a huge number of researchers who do not
practice professional design of any kind taught at art and design
schools. They work with design history, design theory, user studies,
design anthropology, and many other fields. We also have professional
designers who design in other ways, and they work in engineering
design, software design, HCI, or other design fields. This exchange
of notes hit me as quite apt in the context of this thread. The
research artifacts for any of these different kinds of
designer-scholars might be quite different to those of other kinds of
designer-scholars, and design research also embraces fields of
scholarship and learning part from design practice and apart from
research that informs design practice.

I'll close by suggesting you read Kees Dorst's (2008) excellent
article in the current issue of Design Studies: "Design research: a
revolution-waiting-to-happen." Kees raises issues that might
contribute to this thread -- but here, too, I'll come back another
time. I'll just say it is a great read.

Yours,

Ken

--

References

de Camp, L. Sprague. 1963. The ancient engineers. New York: Ballantine.

Dorst, Kees. 2008. "Design research: a revolution-waiting-to-happen."
Design Studies 29 (2008) 4-11

Friedman, Ken. 1997. "Design Science and Design Education." The
Challenge of Complexity. Peter McGrory, editor. Helsinki: University
of Art and Design Helsinki UIAH, 54-72.

Musashi, Miyamoto. 1982. The Book of Five Rings. (With Family
Traditions on the Art of War by Yagyu Munenori.) Translated by Thomas
Cleary. Boston and London: Shambhala.

Petroski, Henry. 1994. The Evolution of Useful Things. How Everyday
Artifacts - from Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers - Came to
be as They Are. New York: Vintage Books.

--

Eduardo Corte-Real wrote:

"Design knowledge is the required knowledge to give form to designed
things, as our friend Thomas Rasmussen would put." ...

"Clive Dilnot, stressed the importance of configuration. Proven to be
right, Clive's Configuration, a specific way to describe Form as
Design, would be the formal manifestation of design Knowledge (great
or poor). "


--

Ken Friedman
Professor

Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia