Dear All,

Been lurking again as I watch the thread on intuition and methodology evolve. It seems to me there is some confusion here in mixing terms that address the ways we do things -- anything -- and specific problems, challenges, or questions in the way we do research.

Scientists and scholars of all kinds use intuition as well as explicit method to explore research questions or problems. That's true in physics and chemistry, medicine and math, history and theology, as well as in design research. I'd like to contribute a few thoughts to the thread, not so much to disagree with anyone -- since I don't -- but to shed a little light on a few corners of the queestion.

Chris Rusts's comments and Terry Love's seemed quite apt to me -- and I'd also recommend looking into the work of the EKSIG group on the role of intuition and personal knowledge in design practice. Research is also a practice, and this is where the confusion often comes into this conversation. Not all design practice is a form of research, but all forms of practice -- both design practice and design research -- require intuition. For that matter, design practice requires method, as do all practices -- law, medicine, engineering, baking, and writing software all require method as well as intuition.

A method is how we do something. Research methods are how we do research. Design methods are how we do design.

Methodology is the comparative study of methods. Research methdology is the comparative study of research methods. Design methodology is the comparative study of design methods.

Methodics is the comprehensive repertoire of methods in a field. The methodics of design research comprises the comprehensive repertoire of research methods that we may use in the fields and disciplines of design research. Because design research is of its nature interdisciplinary, its methodics and repertoirs of methods overlap with the methodics and methods of many other fields. Design practice, in contrast, has less overlap in its methodics because any given field of design practice is embedded in a range of specific actions, tools, and activities.

While many areas of design research overlap biology, medicine, computation, or philosophy, the specific practice of typography will not generally overlap these except in specific instances -- for example, where digital type design overlaps computation. Typographic research, in contrast, may well overlap biology and medicine in terms of legibility or long-term effects of on-screen reading, and this research may inform the skilled practice of digital type design.

The two issues overlapped in Doris Kosminsky's question, and that's what has had me thinking. The two approaches to a response emerged because she referred both to design practice and to science. At some points in the response sequence, these seemed to have been conflated. I think Doris was asking about design practice -- but I also recognize there is a certain confusion here, since no professional practice is a scientific practice except for the practice of scientific research. That is, all practices are "arts," ways of doing things, and this includes medicine, law, and management, as well as design.

The confusion that often seems to trouble us is the idea of a "design science." The design sciences as Herbert Simon defined them ALSO include medicine, law, and management, as well as design, but these are not sciences in the sense that physics is a science. Rather they are organized bodies of knowledge, partly heuristic, partly experiential, partly algorithmic and formalizable. They are partly amendable to scientific description -- and partly changing or changeable, because every problem we study is embedded in the context of a goal toward which we design.

In taking the view that advance professional design practice should be informed by design research, it is not necessary to abandon intution or to argue that design practice or can ever be informed by a comprehensive array of articulate methods. Rather, the argument is -- at least as I see it -- that advanced professional design practice should be informed by research and rigorous inquiry, that it should be an evidence-based practice, and that we do better at practice when we do so on the foundation of a robust, interderdisciplinary education that includes research training, research skills, research methods, and experience in research practice for professional practice.

To do this, we need to understand both the methods and methdologies of our field. Methodological awareness and methodological sensitivity in research involve our ability to understand research methods and use them effectively to answer questions. Methodological awareness in research involves such questions as choice of method, understanding appropriate methods for examining kinds of questions, and awareness of theoretical presuppositions. It involves such issues as problem finding, problem selection, choice of research object, levels of analysis, units of analysis, and other research questions in any project.

Methodological awareness in practice involves similar question regarding the use of tools, systems, approaches -- and it involves understanding what kinds of questions we ought to be asking as we design in service to a stakeholder or problem owner.

Eduardo Corte-Real coined an interesting term a few years ago, methodoxy. I think this is a great term that captures an important aspect of all practices. A "doxa" is a teaching, and a methodoxy would be the teaching of methods, as contrasted with the study of methods. What makes this term so apt is that it captures the way that the great arts and guild crafts have always transmitted their knowledge from master to apprentice, as well as between master and master, and between masters and accepted journeyman. I'd say that methodoxy is how any guild teaches it methods -- including the guild of scientific research practitioners.

But the difference between methodoxy and methdology would be the difference between preaching and evangelism based on the magisterium of a church with its doxological foundation or pursuing systematic theology that enquires into the teaching and its presuppositions.

Bryan Byrne and Ed Sands (2001) wrote a very useful article on how guild traditions and culture inform design methods in studio practice. I also examine this topic (Friedman 1998) in two contexts, design education and the larger context of the guild traditions.

As I see it, methodoxy is the body of teaching arts that enable an spprentice to develop crafts guild knowledge, artisan knowledge, and journeyman skill, rising through practice to mastery -- that is, developing the skills that make one a master.

In contrast, methodology is the critical comparative study of method. It may inform practice, but it is not in itself a praactice, except of course for professional methodologists who study the practice of methods.

For robust research, we need a rich array of methods. This requires methodological pluralism. One of the best chapters on methods know to me is Herbert Blumer's (1986: 1-60) "The Methodological Position of Symbolic Interactionism." While he writes about a specific range of issues in sociological inquiry, he describes fundamental issues and approaches that work well in many research fields.

Perhaps there is more to say about this, but for now, I feel that I've said enough. I hope I haven't gotten what others intend wrong -- and especially not methodoxy, since Eduardo is father to that word. (Though it may be that the word has several meanings, as it is with many words, and some of these may apply elsewhere than to Eduardo's intention.)

This entire range of issues touches on the question of design knowledge. Without saying too much on this, I can provide the URL to a copy of a paper, Creating design Knowledge, archived at Loughborough University.

www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/cd/research/idater/downloads00/Friedman2000.pdf

And with that, I shall return again to lurk mode.

Warm wishes on an autumn day in Melbourne.

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

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References

Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism. Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Blumer, Herbert. 1986. Symbolic Interactionism. Perspective and Method. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

Byrne, Bryan and Ed Sands. 2001. "Designing Collaborative Corporate Cultures." In Creating Breakthrough Ideas. Bryan Byrne and Susan E. Squires, eds. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 47-69.

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.

Friedman, Ken. 2000. Creating Design Knowledge. From Research into Practice. Loughborough, UK: IDATER 2000 Loughborough University. URL: www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/cd/research/idater/downloads00/Friedman2000.pdf