Friends,

So far, I’ve resisted entering this thread. Clive Dilnot’s note inspired
me.

Webster’s Dictionary defines research with elegant simplicity. The noun
dates from 1577. It came into English from Middle French, recerche, from
recerchier to investigate thoroughly, from Old French, from re- +
cerchier to search. The definition is “1: careful or diligent search, 2:
studious inquiry or examination; especially: investigation or
experimentation aimed at the discovery and interpretation of facts,
revision of accepted theories or laws in the light of new facts, or
practical application of such new or revised theories or laws, 3: the
collecting of information about a particular subject.”

While this definition slants toward scientific research, it also
incorporates interpretive research. The third, subsidiary definition –
gathering information – is part of the research progress, but research
is not a mechanical gathering of information.

Many research traditions have nearly nothing to do with information. For
example, much research in logic or mathematics involves creative
deductive application of rules, propositions, or postulates.
Philosophical research requires rigorous inquiry. The information
involved usually focuses on the issues that arise in the specific
inquiry. 

We need information for historical research or hermeneutics in theology,
Biblical exegesis, geography, or law, but the emphasis in the research
is understanding or interpretation.

Harold Nelson pointed to the problems in the crude understanding of
knowledge in the DIKW model or the so-called knowledge pyramid. The
reason that model fails is its mechanistic application of information
theory to human action, as though we can distill data into information,
information into knowledge, and by concentrating ever more knowledge
achieve wisdom.

The kings of Wall Street certainly had to gather information and
concentrate knowledge to come up with such innovations as mortgage
derivatives. It’s clear that this distillation did not lead to wise
action.

I’m about to run out the door, so I’ll simply say thanks to Clive and
Harold for valuable and sobering points. I see a great value in
cybernetics and information theory – reducing research to information is
something else. Some processes that do not work if we mechanize them.
Research is one.

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman
Professor, Ph.D., Dr.Sci. (hc), FDRS

Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

--

Clive Dilnot wrote:

I have been reminded in this last round of posts by Terry of a line in
one of Heidegger’s late essays ‘Perhaps there is a thinking which is
more sober-minded than the incessant frenzy of rationalization and the
intoxicating quality of cybernetics.’ 

What has surprised me in the long and interminable debate about
“information” is the lack of attention to understanding.

If the question is the possible transformation of the situation—and this
is after all the question for a designer faced with or standing in
relation to a situation in which there is a consideration of change of
change or creation or renewal——then what is operative, what matters, in
relation to the whole is not information but understanding. What is
required is understanding of the possibilities or potentiality contained
in that situation. 

To reduce understanding to information, to give weight only to
“information”; these tendencies, rampant within technology and all
too present within design, point also, somewhat sadly, to the endemic
uselessness of most “design research.” If “research” is reduced to
information-seeking (in the manner of undergraduate students doing
“research” for their projects, then this simply means that all that
is significant about design takes place outside of research for its is
only here that understanding happens. 

The problem however, and we are all aware of it, is that displaced back
out of research—which we can also, work that attempts to bring design to articulate self-consciousness of
itself—then understanding has little recourse other than to stay in the
realm of intuition. 

What is doubly self destructive about the ipso facto equation of
information and research is that it destroys, in the same moment, the
possibility of articulate understanding (which means an understanding of
the possibilities of a situation and of the ways in which the
capabilities that design accesses and puts forward may or may not be
deployed in that situation) and denies itself, as “research” a
meaningful role in all that truly matters. 

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