Dear Eduardo,

Hmmmmm .....

Many thoughts. I’ve been working on a response to Birger, and much of
what he writes folds into what you write. I will try to respond to these
issues in a carefully crafted reply, and to respond as well to
Ranjan’s comments.

Let me clarify a few quick thoughts.

1. There are many good reasons for designers to undertake research in
which professional design activity constitutes part of the research. 

2. There are also many reasons for designers to conduct research that
takes on new shapes and forms, using new methods, structures, and
heuristics.

3. In this context, Ranjan’s example is to the point. Ranjan’s note
describes approaches to research where designers conduct research that
is neither through, by, or for design. In the projects that Ranjan
describes, designers adapt designerly skills and habits of mind as well
as creating new skills and ways of thinking to address social needs
while learning something about the world to do so.

4. You opened you note with a claim about my views on the difference
between reading and drawing. These may typify someone’s views, but
they don’t represent me.

You wrote, “Most of your arguments against research by design lie in
an old prejudice that, in a simplified manner, comes to this: drawing is
a practical activity whereas reading is an intellectual activity.” 

That is not the basis of my argument against research by design or the
Frayling triad, but I’m happy to clarify my views on this issue before
a short note on the triad.

Reading is reading. I don’t see reading as an intellectual activity.
Reading may be an intellectual activity or it may not – it depends on
what you read, how, and why. Thinking is the intellectual activity, and
reading is a practice that can support thinking. Now of course we’ve
got to think when we read, just as we think when we cook, draw, drive a
car, work equations, or run a cyclotron. But reading is no more nor less
an intellectual activity than talking. Reading is a way of getting
information – someone’s words or ideas – from their minds to a
storage place, and from that storage place into our minds. 

It’s inaccurate to say that I fail to “[understand] that drawing -
meaning sketching, depicting, testing - is the intellectual way of
dealing with form.” I have quite the opposite view. While drawing is
far from the only way to deal with form, drawing is clearly an
appropriate intellectual approach to dealing with form.

Because of this, drawing plays a role in research in many fields. Some
time back, I reviewed a book in which chemist and Nobel Laureate Roald
Hoffman (2002: 30) wrote
“that it is impossible to write chemistry without drawing
molecules.” Hoffman’s examined the ways in which words,
equations, and images come together to describe original scientific
contributions to his field. Hoffman’s clear, neatly argued lessons can
be applied to design research as well. 

But drawing, like reading, is also a practice and many forms of drawing
have as little to do with research as many forms of reading. 

We draw in different ways and use drawings in different ways. Hoffman
draws and uses drawings in ways different to either of us. Drawing can
be as much a part of research practice as writing or reading. For that
matter, research is itself a practice.

If I were to turn your argument around, I’d argue that a great many
people in our field are prejudiced against reading and writing, and
I’d say that this prejudice leads to the belief that one can
conduct research without reading or writing. Since the metanarrative of
research requires words, it is impossible to communicate research at a
distance without writing it up or reading what researchers write.
Situations such as lectures or direct conversation use words face to
face or in recorded form may be exceptions, but we still require words
to get information – words or ideas – from the mind of a researcher
into our minds. The main difference is that written text or recording
allow us to store those words or ideas.

Of course, Socrates – as Plato describes him in the Phaedrus –
didn’t trust writing and reading. He argued for words and dialogue
face to face, embedded in living interaction and the flow of living
ideas as conversation between people. But then, that might also be the
basis of an argument against drawings, at least once we store and print
them.

5. The comparison of a professional practitioner in medicine earning a
PhD to do research is quite appropriate. I had an uncle who was a
distinguished and highly respected physician, a medical doctor with his
MD from one of the world’s best medical schools. When he decided to do
research, he earned a PhD to learn how to do research.

The problem I see with a great deal of research done by artists and
designers is that they carry out their activities as artists or
designers and re-badge it as research. 

Much of this – and the problem with the triad – is rooted in a
simple category confusion. Because all professional practices involve
providing services, meeting needs, or solving problems for stakeholders
other than the professional practitioner, most professional practice
requires some form of clinical research into the specific issues of a
problem embedded in its context. Lawyers study the facts of a case and
review legal precedents to shape an argument. Physicians engage in
diagnostics. Engineers study the problem they must solve with a series
of goals having to do with effective and efficient solutions. In this
sense, all professional practitioners tend to engage in research of some
kind within the practice of their professional arts. This does not mean
that all aspects of professional practice constitute or form the basis
of research.

Medical practice has little foundation in research from ancient times
to the 16th century, and physicians were more liable to kill patients
than to cure them. The physician who did the least usually had the best
results as contrasted with physicians who prescribed harmful cures
simply because keeping the patient alive long enough for the body to
recover was better than any alternative. With the advent of Paracelsus,
a few things began to improve, but cures based on poisons such as
mercury and antimony didn’t help much. Improvements were rare through
the 19th century, with bleeding and leeching common, and with surgeons
operating in street clothes. The 20th century saw great improvements as
medical education was reformed with an emphasis on scientific inquiry as
the foundation of medical practice. We have seen major improvements to
medical practice in recent years with the advent of evidence-based
medicine and statistical meta-analysis of cumulative studies conducted
over several decades.

My uncle died before some of the advances came about, but I am certain
that he would have welcomed them. That’s because he was a fully
qualified professional practitioner with an MD who understood the value
of research enough to earn a PhD that was different to his professional
practice. These traditions did not contradict each other, and it is
clear that professional practice and research can function together.
Nevertheless, much medical practice today is still based on artisan
craft guild methods. Many physicians have no interest in research beyond
diagnostics. Much like the street-clothes surgeons who rejected the
findings of Semmelweiss, Lister, and Pasteur, many physicians today rely
on what they learn in medical school with little interest in what
research has to teach us. To this degree, they are still working in the
medical practice of the 1960s or the 1970s or whenever it was they
graduated.

In my view, there is a serious debate between designers whose
understanding of research is an extension of practice and designers
whose understanding of research embeds practice – and other issues –
in the large range of questions one may ask and answer in design.

6. In this respect, the triad is simply confusing. In many cases,
“research by design” answers questions “for design.” In other
cases, all three converge – in some the triad doesn’t work at all. I
simply think it is misleading.

There are better ways to get at this, and the triad doesn’t help.
This is a different position to yours, and possibly a disagreement, but
it is not a prejudice.

7. Terry’s post made good sense to me. I don’t want to make it
sound as though I require a “research question” or hypothesis in a
specific of narrow sense. Obviously, there are many kinds of questions,
issues, subjects, objects of inquiry one may pursue, and they do not
always require a narrow research question or an hypothesis.

8. That said, we nevertheless face the problem of what it is that
creates or contributes to the knowledge of our field. We continue to
face problems and challenges with respect to the kinds of contributions
and truth claims designers make, and much of the problem lies in the
confusion of design practice with research – here the notion of
research by design has hurt our field more than helping it. It has hurt
us precisely because it encourages category confusions while distracting
potentially solid researchers from mastering the repertoire of skills,
information and knowledge they need to conduct research.

In most fields, we expect researchers to have some breadth with a
robust understanding of research methods and methodology, and a range of
other skills. The emphasis on research by design has hindered the
breadth people ought to get when they earn a PhD. 

There are forms of design activity that can and should be embedded in a
research context. Andrew van de Ven (2007) addresses the relationship
between theory and practice in a robust way in a book titled Engaged
Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research. In this
book, he examines many of the question we ought to be considering. The
endless debate on the triad prevents us from making the progress in
research-based professional practice that we ought to make.
Christopher Frayling put forward an interesting idea. It did not work
very well. One point of research is to try things out and move past
those that do not work. It’s time to move on and see what we might
learn from practitioners and professionals in some of the several design
fields that haven’t got stuck on this fruitless point.

Yours,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Dean, Faculty of Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

--

References

Hoffman, Roald. 2002. “Writing (and Drawing) Chemistry.” Writing
and revising the disciplines. Jonathan Monroe, editor. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.

van de Ven, Andrew. 2007. Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for
Organizational and Social Research. New York: Oxford University Press.