Dear All,

First, I’d like to thank Kari Kuutti for changing the header to this
thread. This thread diverged from any concern with innovation some time
ago to become a rich and intriguing thread on the epistemology of design
research. Writing this, a sub-thread that has emerged on the role of
writing in research. The header change will allow us to find it again in
two years when we want to review the conversation.

The thread got off to an interesting start. It seemed to me to be
expressed in a somewhat radical way. Geoff’s notes – and Terry’s
objection – seemed to focus on the concept of writing “as”
research, as though writing itself were to constitute a form of
research. If I’ve got Geoff wrong, I apologize, but the statement that
“words can be the object of the research - as in some forms of
literary and philosophical enquiry - and therefore require writing as a
research process” seems to suggest this. 

This statement seems to conflate several things, thereby confusing
them. These different things are: 1) words as the object of research or
inquiry, 2) words as the means of representing thought, 3) concepts or
thoughts themselves as objects of inquiry, 4) using words in the process
of thinking, inquiring, or engaging in research, 5) words that represent
the results of research or inquiry.

This post is neither comprehensive nor fully thought through. I’ve
picked at it off and on since reading Geoff’s initial post. I keep
going back – over the weekend, I’ve had more time than usual to
enjoy the list, but the workaday week is biting my ankles, so I’m
going to get this off to the list and step back to lurk mode afterward.


This starts with a quick reading of the meanings one can read in
Geoff’s sentence, but it’s not a claim that Geoff would parse his
sentence as I do. To me, at least, these meanings don’t suggest
“writing as a research process.” Let me unpack these five issues
before I clarify why this is so. The point I intend to make is that
words and text have a role in doing research and representing research.
Nevertheless, writing is not “a research process.”

Let me start with a simple claim. We apprehend and participate in the
world through our use of language. We construct our understanding of the
world through language, presenting our understanding of the world
through words and language, taking in what others present to us in the
same way. In this sense, language may include gestures and symbols.
While this claim is simple, there are many ways to get at what it means,
and there are many interpretations of how we build the world through
language. In this sense, everything we do requires language. This
includes research. The claim that we use language to think is a claim
that we must therefore use language to do research. This is different to
the claim that “writing is a research process.”

Before going further, let’s unpack the five different issues involved
in seeing “words [as] the object of the research - as in some forms of
literary and philosophical enquiry.”

1) We study words as the object of research or inquiry in such fields
as lexicography, lexicology, and translation, as well as in branches or
aspects of linguistics, exegetics, hermeneutics, philosophy, philology,
and literature. Not all words are written, though.

2) Many of these fields also include research or inquiry into the issue
of words as the means of representing thought, and we study the
particulars of how we use words and how words create meaning in all
these, with entire branches and fields of linguistics, exegetics,
hermeneutics, and philosophy dedicated to these issues. Again, these
studies include words in many forms, written, spoken, and in speech acts
that may include gestures or symbols as well as words.

3) When we consider concepts or thoughts as objects of inquiry, we move
into most of the human sciences, including exegetics, hermeneutics, and
philosophy and moving into some branches of the human sciences,
including anthropology, sociology, and related areas. The interesting
issue here is that we may well consider concepts or thoughts as objects
of inquiry without writing: Socrates argued in the Phaedrus that we can
only consider these issues through dialog among living participants, and
that writing is a dangerous tool. Sometimes I’ve agreed Socrates.
Sometimes I’ve argued against him on the principle that representing
thought in the externalized form of text makes democracy possible in any
community larger than an ancient city, and is a requirement of democracy
in modern nation states. Whichever view you take, we all know that the
live dialog of the seminar or symposium shapes and deepens
understanding; we talk our ideas through, talking through and deepening
our inquiry as well as developing research. Here, though, the words
remain objects of inquiry or tools of inquiry. It is thinking that is
the research process, and not the tools we use to think. Even though the
tools we use shape what we can think and what we can think about, to say
this remains a different and distinct issue to making the claim that
writing is “a research process.”

4) We generally use words in the process of thinking, inquiring, or
engaging in research. That is the nature of what it is to be human being
embedded in a world of language. Fil raised a question of whether human
beings can “think” without language. In my view, at least, they
cannot. What it is to be human and to shape a human world involves
symbolic interaction of some kind. While there are other accounts and
approaches to this, I find that the symbolic interactionist perspective
offers a reasonable account. Pragmatist philosopher George Herbert Mead
developed this, extending Alfred Schutz’s work, and sociologist
Herbert Blumer in turn built on Mead. This view is not all that
different to the social constructionist position of Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckmann. Berger’s solo book The Sacred Canopy teases out some
of the mechanisms and consequences of social construction especially
well, demonstrating how it works as an agency the builds the human
life-world. Once again, language is both a process and a product of
human thought – even an ontological property of human being. Even
though we use words and language in everything we do, this does not make
using words or writing a research process.

5) When we speak of using words to represent the results of research or
inquiry, we are clearly describing words as an instrument or tool, not
as a research process.

Kari posted a note on research, thinking, and writing with a list of
six kinds of thinking: 1. “Pure” thinking without any props. 2.
Thinking by talking to oneself, either silently or aloud. 3. Thinking by
reading. 4. Thinking by discussing. 5. Thinking by writing. 6. Thinking
by doing. 

To this, Ranjan added another: 7. Thinking with visual scenarios.

As Kari noted, writing in this sense may be part of a thinking process,
but it is not in its own right a research process. Addressing the issue
of how different ways to think about questions brings up a range of
useful and challenging issues – these deserve another thread. I wanted
to acknowledge these valuable comments before proceeding to a couple of
issues that have not yet surfaced in these threads, and this is a
specific role that writing plays in doing and representing research
without itself being a research process. This aspect of the role of
writing in research writing is common and pervasive to all research. 

What, then, is the role of writing in research? This issue involves
several fundamental questions. Why do we write up our research? Why
can’t we just produce an artifact or an object? Why can’t we just
put forward an artifact along with a brief explanation?

There are several reasons to write up our research. One involves the
status of research as a series of acts that take place within the
researcher. Research is a form of inquiry, a thinking act. Thinking is
an internal act invisible to those outside the thinker, and the form of
thinking that constitutes a research event is invisible in exactly that
way. This may change if we ever achieve telepathic communication, and it
may change if we can ever reliably and exactly scan brains to transmit
thoughts, but these possibilities are speculative. Some aspects of every
research process take place in the physical world, and research may
involve artifacts, activities, tests, or projects that operate in the
physical world. Nevertheless, the research act itself takes place in the
mind.

To represent the research act, therefore, we engage in a special
narrative to externalize the research process so that others can
understand our research. This is the meta-narrative of research.

Because we can think without writing, scientific or scholarly inquiry
doesn’t require writing. Thinking does require symbols, for human
beings, though and we require representation to share our research with
others. 

Some forms of science or scholarship can be expressed in numbers. Some
forms of science require process descriptions in the form of words.
Other forms of science require illustrations or models in the form of
drawings. 

A while back, I reviewed a book for Design Research News in which I
discussed a chapter by Chemist and Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann titled
‘Writing (and Drawing) Chemistry.’ Hoffmann’s approach was nicely
balanced between the requisites of workaday science and playful poetry.
Hoffmann explained how people report the research involved in designing
chemicals, an explanation related to Ranjan’s point about the role of
visualization. Hoffman (2002) wrote “it is impossible to write
chemistry without drawing molecules.” Hoffman’s elegant discussion
shows how words, equations, and images come together to describe
original scientific contributions to his field in a clear, neatly argued
lesson that can help the growth of our field.

This form of scientific inquiry and others require several media of
communication combined. Here, too, research and scientific inquiry take
place in the mind. We represent research results and scientific findings
in spoken words, written text, numbers, and images. This is how we
document, codify, and share research and science. Most scientific
description requires narrative of some kind, even in such numerical
fields as mathematics and physics. Further, it is through words rather
than numbers that we convey the meta-narratives of research that help us
to explain assumptions, limits, processes, choices, and research
decisions.

We write research to communicate it in a way that allows others to
understand and apply it. 

Here we come to the problem of the naked artifact as a research output.
No artifact explains itself. No research process explains itself. 

Thus we require the meta-narrative of research. The meta-narrative of
research explains the thought and action that took us from an initial
question, puzzle, or problem, to the final published result. The
elements of the meta-narrative generally require us to: 

1. State the research problem, or the issue at the heart of our
inquiry, 

2. Discuss the knowledge in the field to date, 

3. Discuss past attempts to examine or solve the problem, 

4. Discuss our research methods and approach, 

5. Compare possible alternative research methods, 

6. Discuss the problems we encountered in our research, 

7. Explain how we addressed those problems, 

8. Explicitly contribute to the body of knowledge within the field, 

9. State implications for future research. 

The steps in the recipe vary according to need. That is the case of any
practice, from surgery or law to baking biscuits and brewing beer.
Publishing our work is the difference between research that we share
with others and study that we undertake for ourselves. This also
explains the importance of publication.

Is it possible to communicate research without publishing it? Yes. We
often communicate research in the specific research context, or in a
seminar, or at a conference and we don’t always publish it to do so.
We still use words, though, as tools. We also communicate research using
recording devices such as audiotape, videotape, DVD, or the web. 

Is it possible to communicate research without using words? No. 

There is more to this range of issues. Writing and describing research
has a value to the researcher himself or herself that is distinct from
and different to the value of communicating the research to others. 

Robert Amsler (2007: unpaged) describes it nicely: 

“Research results seem to be incomplete until they are written up,
and in the writing come new insights into the work that you didn’t
have when you were performing it. Language structures thought through
rhetorical conventions which stimulate additional thought.

“Research activity proceeds in a fairly linear fashion, whereas
language poses problems of explanatory necessity to complete its
statements.

“You can often DO something immediately following a prior action, but
you often cannot SAY something following a previous statement without
setting the background for its understanding. I suppose the missing
component is that when writing you understand that you cannot assume the
reader had your same state of mind, whereas as the actor DOING things,
you knew your state of mind.”

The meta-narrative of research requires us to examine, challenge, and
weigh our own work and the processes that we use in doing the work. The
process is never perfect, but it is always a step in the right
direction.

The role of writing in research is only one aspect of research. While
writing is a research tool that aids the thought process, it is not a
research process, nor a research method. It is a thinking process that
allows us to think through and reflect on the processes and methods we
use.

To suggest that we can engage in research “by” writing is much like
the argument that we can do research “by” designing. Research
activities may include these acts, but they cannot themselves constitute
research. Research requires a range of skills and knowledge along with
methodological awareness and methodological sensitivity. This makes it
nearly impossible to engage in research without appropriate training. 

Every field produces an occasional untrained research genius. In
mathematics, Srinivasa Ramanujan is the great case in point. Ramanujan
started his career as a mathematician by working through a textbook that
was fifty years out of date when he acquired his copy. Using this
outdated book, he taught himself mathematics, developing a wide range of
important results. Unknown to Ramanujan, many of these results were
already known. They important when they were first discovered,
demonstrating the depth of Ramanujan’s intellect and mathematical
intuition, but they were not a contribution to the knowledge of the
field. One result of this is that Ramanujan was renowned both for the
profound depth of his intellect and the limitations of his knowledge. 

It seems to me unlikely that there will be a Ramanujan in design
research any time soon. There are several reasons. First, there are few
examples of profound truth claims that one can make in design without
knowledge of prior developments. Second, design is not a likely field
for demonstrating the kinds of deductive claims that one can make in
mathematics or physics from widely agreed principles or axioms. Third,
much of the most advanced work in design requires working in a design
context with a team of researchers and practitioners. 

To imagine a designerly Ramanujan is like imagining a naïe sociologist
who has never read Weber, Simmel, Mead, or Blumer. Another imaginary
example might be like a folk engineer with no concept of mechanical
production: able to design a cargo cult airplane in bamboo, perhaps even
a bamboo plane that flies, but unable to design airplane parts for
manufacture. The folk engineering approach to research gives us what we
often see in art and design: people who know little or nothing about
research transmitting incorrect information and poor skills to those who
know less than they do. 

And that brings us back to one of the great purposes of writing in
research: sharing what we know so that others can understand, adapt, and
apply it to their own work.

In general terms, Lubomir got it right. Geoff asked, “Perhaps the
question becomes: when and why does some specific sort of design
activity become (part of) an appropriate approach to creating
knowledge?” Lubomir responded, “This is the key to the solution of
the controversy. … My thesis is that any design activity can be
theorized and methodologized in accordance with academic standards and
can be presented as a research project. In that case, it will be
research. Submitting only the production documents is design. In this
regard, I don’t see big differences between my position and your post.
I have talked about this concept in previous posts on doctoral
dissertations and academic standards for design research.”

This works for writing. Writing by itself is writing. Writing is a
research tool, but not a research method or a research process. For
writing to constitute part of a research process, it must be structured
as an articulate part of the research process, and the questions we ask
must have something to do with words or with writing, as the case is for
fields in which we study different aspects of words or writing. As
nearly as I can tell, this rarely takes place in design except in such
fields as typography or information design. Much of what passes for
writing in the research process is legitimate, but it is an adjunct to
research and it does not constitute a research process. 

Writing is certainly not a research process as John Lennon might have
put it: “in its own write.”

Best regards,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3
9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design


References

Amsler Robert. 2007. Subject: RE: 20.391 Feynman’s version of
Kelvin’s declaration. Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 392.
London: Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London.
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007, Subject: 20.392 making, saying, understanding.
Archived at: www.princeton.edu/humanist/

Hoffmann, Roald. 2002. “Writing (and Drawing) Chemistry. Writing and
Revising the Disciplines. Jonathan Monroe, Editor. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, pp. 29-53.