Dear Don,
Winston Churchill supposedly said that "Britain and America are two great nations that are divided by a common language." Whether or not he said it, it's an apt quote here for the different fields of design research.
From my perspective, exegetics emerges from the social sciences, going back to classics and rhetoric, and ultimately to theology. It's one among several useful techniques or methods in understanding what things mean and how things mean what they mean. Exegetics and ekphrastics together work nicely in generating what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called "thick description." But you can also get there by other roads: symbolic interactionism is one approach and grounded theory can be adapted to serve that end. Despite the fact that the term is a technical term that can occur in art, I use it as a technical term from the social sciences.
Because design is interdisciplinary, we face problems that other disciplines don't face. Or at least they don't face them in the same degree.
Your post nicely summarizes arguments that we have yet to resolve on the nature of the PhD. In 2003, we have an online conference on this list titled "Design in the University." You'll find it in the list archives for 2003 from message 1168 on. One of the participants was Dick Taylor, a professor of computer science at University of California at Irvine. Once at dinner, I recall Richard lamenting the fact that he had over and over again to explain to talented programmers why writing a program was not the same to writing a PhD thesis and why one could not get a PhD for a great program or a marvelous hack. Every five or six years, these same debates go round again -- I supposed it is the challenge of consolidating a field, even an interdisciplinary field.
I must confess that I, too, am often confused. It sometimes seems as though I can barely keep up -- especially in a world where one must track information from so many places just to stay on top of our own place. I just brought some boxes of books out of storage and found buried in them some economics titles I'd been missing. These particular titles involve Fritz Machlup's work on information economics, as well as work by Harold Innis, a key influence on Marshall McLuhan and Colin Clark, an Australian economist whose work influence Daniel Bell's model of post-industrial economy. I've been trying to locate these titles to look at issues involving the role of design (verb, that is, design activity or the collective activity of the design profession) in the world today. Clearly a social science problem, and yet a problem in design research.
Quite different to solving a design problem (how to design) until one considers issues that affect how what we do involves the people that use the artifacts we design. Then these issues collide.
I myself am often a moderately puzzled scholar divided by a common language. Other times, it's not so moderate.
Warm wishes,
Ken
Don Norman wrote:
--snip--
I think that Ken's very thorough discussion of the definitions of exegesis and ekphrasis coupled with my tongue-in-cheek posting does actually serve a
useful reminder about the difficulties design faces as an academic discipline.
--snip--
Design has several very different academic homes. Ken's discussion suggests that one home is where those terms originated from: art history, art criticism, or classics (or is that three homes?).
My home happens to come from science and engineering. Many designers were trained in departments of mechanical engineering (product design and industrial design). Many from departments of design where the faculty have various histories. And many from schools of art and/or architecture which has its own history. And in many of those departments the PhD is mainly for people who do criticism or history. In Science and engineering, you get PhDs
for fundamental contributions to knowledge, not for criticism, not for history.
One reason we often fail to communicate is because these disciplines are so different. Because the language and philosophy differ.
The social and behavioral sciences use methods that are similar to those in the hard sciences and engineering. But art and literature is very different.
--snip--
We never discussed the philosophy of the PhD degree. Basically we we simply told that it had to be an important, fundamental contribution to knowledge and understanding. (If you worked for 3 years to discover or produce something, and the week before your final PhD defense someone else published that same result, you were dead; you had to start over again.)
We had to review enough of the history of the problem to show we knew of previous work and to establish where our work stood in relation to that previous work: where it agreed, where it disagreed (and why), and where we had added an important new contribution. Seemed so simple and obvious to
us, both as faculty and students, that I had never ever heard any debate about what constituted a PhD until as a tenured faculty member, I was on a PhD thesis in Music (where the thesis was a composition). Wow -- was that an eye-opening fight!
There is also one other important distinction that confuses our field: thinking versus doing, or rather, the academic study of design versus the practice of design. And many academics who study design actually study designers which is somewhat difference from design itself. For that matter when we say we study design, do we mean design the noun, or design the verb. To study the noun is to study the products. To study the verb is to study the methods.
The Music PhD fight was precisely about this: Composing the music was, to us academics, an exercise is practice. Why was it worthy of a PhD? If it advanced the state of music, then that knowledge should be stated plainly and clearly in a way that others could build upon. Just listening to the music would not suffice. If it was just a composition -- even if fantastically brilliant -- it was not a PhD. "Why not?" asked the music faculty (few of whom had PhDs).
I hear that same argument in design.
I mostly study interaction, which in many places isn't even counted as design (e.g., in computer science, where human-computer interaction is not design. It is, well it is something else.) Would it count as a PhD in design? In the major PhD-granting institutions I work with (PhD in design that is), it would. It some, I suspect it would not.
No wonder we have such different backgrounds, methods and vocabularies. No wonder we cannot agree what constitutes a PhD, or for that matter, what
constitutes a masters degree: MS? MA? MFA? MDes?
--snip--
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