Friends,

A few footnores to my earlier post.

If there was any lack of clarity in talking about the fact that research
is not retrospective, I was referring to the fact that the word
"research" does not mean a backward search or a retrospective look. The
word means diligent inquiry or thorough examination. The word research
comes from a Middle French word recherche. The history and etymology of
this word do not involve searching or looking _again_, but rather
searching or looking _thoroughly_. The "re" is an emphatic suffix, not a
temporal suffix.

I discuss the word and its meanings in an article in Design Studies,

Friedman, Ken. 2003. “Theory construction in design research: criteria:
approaches, and methods.” Design Studies, 24 (2003), 507–522.

You can download it from the journal web site at

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/30409/description#description

If your library subscribes, go through the library web site and
downloads will be free.

Some of the dances are quite charming. I'd imagine that we could develop
some excellent choreographic interpretations of design research projects
for next year's contest.

At the same time, I find myself interested in one specific aspect of the
dances I've seen. I would like to see what would happen in a peer review
process where I asked different researchers in the field of the
choreographer scientist to consider an assumption and write a review:

"This dance communicates a research project in your field. Please
describe the research project that you believe this dance communicates."

Just for fun, of course, it would also be interesting to show the same
dance to scholars in other fields.

"This dance communicates a research project. Please describe the
research project that you believe this dance communicates."

It would be difficult for an anthropologist to confuse a research paper
in anthropology with a research paper in photosynthesis, logic gates, or
psychopharmaceuticals. The anthropologist might not know what the paper
was "really" about or how good it might be, but most scholars -- nearly
all senior scholars -- would discern the subject field from the journal
title and the abstract, and many would be able to understand from the
abstract what the article was about in rough terms. It's not clear to me
that an anthropologist could tell the difference between a
photosynthensis dance, an anthropology dance, and a logic dance.

Do please read the article in Design Studies to learn more on the
meaning and etymology of the word "research."

That's it for now. I felt that a thread on dancing deserved a footnote.

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

Telephone +61 3 9214 6755
www.swinburne.edu.au/design