Dear Andy,
You asked with respect to my post:
[1]
KF: "The issue is not the problem of a false dichotomy between theory and practice. It is rather that some folks imagine there to be an abstract function in the world known as "theory" and another function known as "practice" that has properties inconsistent with theory."
AP: What's the difference between those statements? You seem to be re-phrasing the same essential point.
KF: Apologies for the ambiguity in language. This is, in one sense, a restatement, but it amplifies the nature of the problem.
There is no dichotomy between theory and practice. The reason for the false or inaccurate notion of a dichotomy is that some people imagine there to be an abstract function in the world known as "theory" and another function known as "practice" that has properties inconsistent with theory.
I was attempting to explain the reason that the dichotomy is false, pointing to an article as a deeper explanation on this issue of how to understand the relation between practice and theory in a more useful way.
[2]
KF: This and other recent threads address provocative points. I'd be more comfortable if I had the sense that these conversations demonstrated a sense of what we already know about these issues. But that brings us back to Don Norman's (2010) comment on how often our papers and conversations fail to address what is already known.
AP: Well, that's probably true, but it's also a design problem. Journals and conferences are terribly poor ways to share and build up a body of knowledge.
KF: I'd have to disagree with this in great part. We haven't yet managed well in our field for exactly the reasons that Don Norman discusses. Among our weak spots is using the robust system of current literature to understand what is already known in the fields on which we draw in the transdisciplinary work of design.
Conferences work well when they are focused, solid, and robust. I won't go into what works and what doesn't in design conferences other than to say that our field has a handful of serious conferences and a great many conferences that do not serve us well. The number of our journals is growing, but we have only a few journals that serve the field as well as they might.
Nevertheless, it is inaccurate to say that " journals and conferences are terribly poor ways to share and build up a body of knowledge." This is hardly the case in such fields as physics or philosophy, nor in fields linked to such professional practices as law, medicine, or engineering. The issue is how we build and use journals and conferences: the quality of the journals and conferences in a field, and the way we use them make them poor or excellent. We have done poorly in the field of design, and the fact that this is a young research field has much to do with it.
Someone once asked Richard Feynman what single document he would save if everything else in our libraries were to be destroyed. In the event of such a catastrophe, he suggested that we could rebuild nearly the entirety of our technological and scientific base provided that we managed to save the complete run of the journal Philosophical Transactions.
Now there is in your comment a subtle issue that I won't address here, and that involves the differences between data, information, and knowledge. We record and transmit information in journals and we share information in conferences. Knowledge is a property of knowing agents, and for any of us to "know" something, we must take information in, adapt it, apply it, and master it, to engender mastery. The "knowledge of a field" is never recorded, but it always inheres in those knowing persons that comprise the field; what journals are very good at is sharing the descriptions of what we learn and know, so that we can help others to expand their knowledge by sharing information about what we know.
Allowing for these distinctions between information and knowledge, journals and conferences are marvelous mechanisms for fields whose members manage to build them and use them in a robust way. We have not designed the majority of our mechanisms as well as others have done in fields such as physics, medicine, engineering, or informatics.
When more of our journals rise to the level of Design Studies, International Journal of Design, or Design Issues, it will be a different story. (I could add another five or six journals to the list, but Gerda Gemser, Cees de Bont, Paul Hekkert and I have just completed an article on that exact topic, now under submission at a leading journal. I'll keep the list to myself until we publish.)
In a light illustration of a serious topic, I'll offer an example by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman (1998) on what economists and policy-makers could have learned from a simply article. You can read it for yourself at Slate:
http://www.slate.com/id/1937/
The point is this: someone with the skill and knowledge to read well and draw from an interesting case can "know" a great deal. This is the case of a modest empirical model, a "toy world," if you will -- and from it, a serious economist knows how to develop a major conclusion.
That's the value of a journal, a conference, or other such mechanisms in building a body of knowledge.
Yours,
Ken
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Reference
Krugman, Paul. 1998. "Baby-Sitting the Economy. The baby-sitting co-op that went bust teaches us something that could save the world." Slate. Friday, August 14, 1998.
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Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3 9214 6078 | www.swinburne.edu.au/design
Conference Co-Chair: Doctoral Education in Design - Practice, Knowledge, Vision | Hong Kong Polytechnic University | May 22-25, 2011 | www.sd.polyu.edu.hk/DocEduDesign2011
Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life | University of Chicago Press | http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?isbn=9780226033594
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