Hi All,
I find myself in profound disagreement with Terry, and with many observations made by Ken in his writing on this subject.
As Terry writes:
> Ken has mentioned the master-apprentice model. The defect of the master-apprentice model is the propagation of stupidity and false beliefs if the master is wrong and the apprentice is too lazy to do the necessary critical thinking to identify errors and create new theories that correct them, or instead adopts a convenient mixture that blurs the understanding to the point that clarity and accuracy of understanding is lost. Evidence of this effect of the master-apprentice way of thinking (including studio learning and over-revering previous designers and researchers ) is evident in how old and quite superficial concepts form the literature are viewed uncritically as gospel.
There are, of course, many bad masters and many bad apprentices. There are also many who are not stupid, nor inarticulate, nor lazy. And there are many masters who have made substantial and ongoing contributions to our knowledge and past on their knowhow to their apprentices, not least in the art and craft of supervising PhD students: a master, apprentice relation with an honorable and continuing tradition of excellence.
There is much to value that has emerged from that tradition and there are good pedagogic and scholarly reasons why such traditions have been and continue to be highly productive in design and many other areas of practice.
It seems to me that in the search:
> for a new direction … that requires a new broom and new theory
ends up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. What is offered as 'NEW' does not seem to me new at all, rather a mixture of pedestrian scholarship and naive empiricism. Moving backwards. And it seems to undervalue the intellectual crafts of designing, many of which cannot be developed or practiced in the current educational institutions in our field. If I believed in conspiracies, I would suggest that the lack of fit between these intellectual crafts and the current institutional frameworks is what underlies their rejection in favor of the so called 'NEW'.
The category of 'research by design' is not fruitless. Indeed, there is a type of research which can only done BY DESIGNING, and to suggest otherwise is imho a misreading of Frayling's comments. Happily, there is a thriving and lively community of research by design outside the current institutional academic settings, and it will continue to thrive because it is needed and valued.
For those of you interested in my arguments on this, I wrote an article that was published three years ago in Visible Language.
There is also a copy of it available to our Institute's Members and Fellows at:
http://communication.org.au/publications/principles---philosophy/designing-philosophy-2/145,30.html
David
--
blog: www.communication.org.au/dsblog
web: http://www.communication.org.au
Professor David Sless BA MSc FRSA
CEO • Communication Research Institute •
• helping people communicate with people •
Mobile: +61 (0)412 356 795
Phone: +61 (0)3 9489 8640
Skype: davidsless
60 Park Street • Fitzroy North • Melbourne • Australia • 3068
|