*** Long Post ***

Dear Terry,

Thanks for your note. I’ve taken the liberty of changing the subject
header, as Victor suggested. While you’re raising reasonable questions
about theoretical and conceptual problems, I’m going to address this
in methodological and practical terms. 

At several points, I’m going to offer links with useful resources to
meet some of the needs you’ve identified. Along the way, I’ll offer
a few short thoughts in response. The issues are important, but this
post is only a quick reply. It does not do justice to the significant
challenges you raise. Rather, I propose some educational and practical
solutions to long-term problems. This is a long post with specific
resources for those who wish them as teaching tools or learning
resources. If this doesn't interest you, please feel free to delete or
scroll on by.

1. Practical diagnosis and remedy of conceptual problems.

You asked about “Practical diagnosis and remedy of the conceptual
problems in the literature.”

This really isn’t a matter of the literature, but of conceptual
problems in research. While one might address the past literature, our
literature is still young enough that we can afford to draw on strong
literature and ignore much of the rest. While there is a massive
literature of unused conference proceedings, no one cites this and most
of this has no impact. There is an equally massive gray literature of
minor position papers, and it lacks influence in a similar way. The real
problem is that this literature mirrors the tea-room conversations that
we don’t record and can’t refute – these will always be with us,
though the degree of influence will diminish the field develops.

To correct the problems you note, it is more important to help the
field develop than to worry about endless corrections to inconsequential
writings. 

The first place to address this challenge is graduate school. The first
step is better doctoral education is the first step. (See 1.1 below.)
The second step is stronger research training, as well as specific
training in writing research. (See 1.2 below.) The third step involves
working toward a better literature in the future. Better reviewing is
the answer. (See 1.3 below.) In these notes I offer some practical tools
and resources to help those who want to work toward these goals.

1.1 Research Training

For the first, we should address these issues in doctoral programs.
People who have a solid background in a PhD program with responsible
research training will avoid the kinds of conceptual and theoretical
problems that you describe. This doesn’t mean that we’ll ever get it
right – there is no perfect research tradition in any field. It’s a
matter of giving people a good chance at doing well. The fact that we
are not doing so as often as we should says a great deal about problems
in the design field.

For some people, this problem arises from the fact that many PhD
degrees are awarded by programs that conflate design practice with
research practice. This is especially problematic in PhD programs at
schools or faculties where an art and design perspective places design
research under the supervision of artists whose goals and criteria are
different to those of designers. This is quite different to the reasoned
incorporation of design projects and processes within a larger research
program. Unfortunately, there are too many places where students can get
a PhD for producing and exhibiting a series of artifacts while writing a
20,000-word essay mistakenly labeled as an “exegesis.” One cannot
expect people with this kind of background to avoid the conceptual
problems you describe. For a serious PhD, one needs methodological
awareness and theoretical maturity; the rest of us can’t remedy the
gaps that result from the educational deficiencies of poor doctoral
training.

Many of us do our best to give students the solid research training
that one expects in any research degree. While the methods and objects
of inquiry differ by discipline, some of us don’t accept the argument
that “design is different.”

Supervisors and doctoral students who want a good general overview of a
serious research degree will find two books especially helpful:

Peters, Robert L. 1997. Getting What You Came For. The Smart
Student’s Guide to Earning a Master’s or Ph.D. New York: The
Noonday Press.

Rugg, Gordon, and Marian Petre. 2004. The Unwritten Rules of PhD
Research. Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press.

PhD supervisors who want to understand and master their art should go
on to a third book intended for them rather than for their students:

Delamont, Sara, Paul Atkinson, and Odette Parry. 1997. Supervising the
PhD. A Guide to Success. Buckingham, England, and Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania: The Society for Research into Higher Education and the
Open University Press.

There are also an increasing number of good opportunities to help
students develop their research skills. 

One excellent approach is that of the Design Advanced Research Training
series co-ordinated by David Durling at the Birmingham Institute of Art
and Design. 

For information on the program, see DART: 

 http://www.dartevents.org/

The DART web site also includes an online library of excellent
resources.

Many fields organize special conferences for doctoral students and
doctoral consortia at major conferences. I’ve seen a few calls for
doctoral student conferences lately, and there is now a doctoral
consortium at IASDR. This year’s doctoral consortium is on the 31st of
October.

 http://www.iasdr2011.org/

What doesn’t help is the fact that many universities encourage
doctoral students to present at conferences simply for the purpose of
learning to do a presentation, whether or not their work is serious
enough to warrant a conference presentation slot. Doctoral students
should learn to present. That’s the purpose of such programs as DART,
doctoral colloqiums, and special student conferences.

1.2 Research Writing Workshops 

A second level of help is to provide training and assistance in
scholarly and scientific writing. We do this at Swinburne, and many
other universities do so as well.

Some helpful documents are widely available. This is a partial list
from my workshops:

Strunk, William, Jr. 1999 [1918]. The Elements of Style. Available from
URL: 

 http://www.bartleby.com/141/ 

--

Copeland, Jack. 2011. How to Write an Essay. Available from URL: 

 http://www.hums.canterbury.ac.nz/phil/resources.shtml

--

Emerald Insight’s How to Write Guides. Available from URL: 

 http://www.emeraldinsight.com/authors/guides/write/index.htm

--

Starbuck, William. 1999. “Fussy Professor Starbuck’s Cookbook of
Handy-Dandy Prescriptions for Ambitious Academic Authors or Why I Hate
Passive Verbs and Love My Word Processor.” Available from URL:

 http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~wstarbuc/Writing/Fussy.htm

--

Wellman, Barry. 1999. How To Write – and Edit – a Paper. Available
from URL: 

 http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/index.html

(Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the PDF).

--

Gopen, George D., and Judith A. Swan. 19. “The Science of Scientific
Writing.” American Scientist On-Line Archives. Originally published in
the November-December 1990 issue of American Scientist. 
Available at URL: 


http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-science-of-scientific-writing

--

Arnould, Eric. 2006. “Getting a Manuscript to Publishing Standard.”
Design Research Quarterly, v. 1, n. 1, pp. 21-23. Available at URL:


http://www.designresearchsociety.org/joomla/index.php/publications/drq/drq-public.html

--

1.3 Reviewing

There is no way to remedy problems of poor conceptual and theoretical
quality in articles and books that have been published except through
criticism and debate. Most of the time, it is not worth the effort. 

What does help is better reviewing prior to publication. Here are
several articles on the art of reviewing.

--

Bieber, Michael. 2011. How to Review. Available from URL: 

  http://www-ec.njit.edu/~bieber/review.html 

--

Chilton, Stephen. “The Good Reviewer.” Academe 85 (6,
November-December 1999): 54-55. Available from URL: 

 http://www.d.umn.edu/~schilton/Articles/Reviewer.html

--

Zmud, Bob. 1998. “Editor’s Comments: 
 A Personal Perspective on the State of Journal Refereeing”
Management Information Systems Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 3, Sept. 1998.
Available from URL: 

 http://www.misq.org/reviews/

(Click on the link “A Personal Perspective.”) 

--

Lee, Allen S. 1995. “Reviewing a Manuscript for Publication.”
Journal of Operations Management, Vol. 13, No. 1 (July 1995), 87-92.

 http://www.people.vcu.edu/~aslee/referee

--

2. Using the existing literature more or better.

While there is little value to using poor items from the existing
literature, we have the beginnings of a serious that we should make more
use of. We can also make better use of the existing literature – the
direct design literature, the cognate literature, and relevant
literature from other fields.

To my mind, better use requires careful, critical reading and
intelligent application. One of the problems I see in many papers is the
careless use of material that authors have not read carefully enough to
deploy well. 

To start, it is vital to read the material we cite. The authors of many
papers make assertions or use citation patterns showing that they have
not read source documents they claim to cite. This is especially the
case for authors who are fashionable in design circles where citing the
work becomes an ostensible prestige factor. Many citations to Peirce
suggest the author has not used the edition cited, which means at the
least that the author has not read Peirce, but is faking the
information. The frequent use of Schon by people who never cite Argyris
suggests that they haven’t really read Schon on the subjects they
claim to address. My favorite fraudulent citation was that of an author
who cited Newton, using the publication date of an edition that was
written in Latin rather than a recent English translation.

Another common problem in using – or issuing – good literature
occurs when authors fail to argue their own case in the explicit
narrative of the article. Each author must  argue the case he or she
hopes to make. The argument must appear in the explicit text of the
author’s own article. A reference to an external source is
insufficient foundation for a step in an argument on which the
author’s own contribution rests. External sources support an
argument, but external support for an argument cannot replace the
argument itself. Many authors confuse the two.

Authors use the literature well by using precise, fine-grained
references that permit the reader to locate quoted material at the exact
location in the source document. Fine-grained references allow the
reader to review, question, and challenge cited sources as well as
permitting readers to review, question, and challenge the use that
authors make of their sources. The discipline of using precise
references also improves an article because it requires authors to
review and check the sources for themselves. This helps to prevent many
kinds of simple conceptual and theoretical problems. It helps authors to
refresh their understanding of the source material, and it leads to
stronger and more robust arguments. 

With respect to precise, fine-grained references, it is vital to treat
direct quotations, indirect quotations, and paraphrases in the same way.
This is the increasingly common standard in other fields. Giving precise
references for all quotations and for all cited sources of any kind
serves the same functions for reader and author alike.

Learning to use the literature better has many values. This is
something we can teach in research degree programs (1.1, above) and in
research writing programs (1.2, above). We can gradually improve the way
the field addresses these challenges through better reviewing (1.3,
above).

3. Conceptual Theory Failures 

While your comments on conceptual theory failures are interesting,
there is no simple way to address this. The best way to address this
involves the hard work of slowly improving the quality of the field.

What you’re suggesting involve one normal process and a process you
don’t define. The normal process you’re describing involves a
serious literature of articles in which an author challenges the
conclusions of another author, addressing the conceptual theory problems
in the article. This also happens in book reviews. There are
opportunities for this in the design field when an article or book is
relevant enough to warrant such a response. For ordinary but minor
challenges that don’t warrant a full article, one may also write a
letter to the editors, and I’d encourage more journals to think about
the kinds of responses and rejoinders we occasionally see in Design
Issues. When something matters enough to warrant a serious response,
these are the normal mechanisms in every field.

Most of seriously flawed literature in any field is inconsequential. In
a field such as ours with low literacy and undeveloped citation
patterns, it is even less consequential than in other fields. As it is,
there’s no way to prevent ill-informed and poorly trained research
beginners from finding and citing conclusions that fit their
predilections. 

Even though one might identify flawed work, there remains a practical
problem. You suggest that “critical epistemological analyses … can be
sharp and short. Commonly, in practical terms, it can be achieved by
relatively simple composition of analytical deductions already
established by others; usually outside the design field.”

The practical problem is this: Who wants to spend their time doing
this? And if anyone did wish to spend their time doing this, who would
publish these “sharp and short” critiques?

If you’re talking about selected examples, with “discussion [that]
may require a little referencing of a small number of examples,” then
why not just do it? I think the most useful approach would be to examine
specific kinds of conceptual and theoretical problems in articles that
address limited specific themes. I suspect something of this nature
might find a home in a decent journal, provided that it demonstrated
that the problem under discussion was a significant problem for the
field, while pointing to solutions.

For those who want to reflect on the nature of conceptual adequacy and
theory development, I’d recommend 

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

This is an elegant book. Andy Van de Ven is Heath Chair of
Organizational Innovation and Change at University of Minnesota. His
personal web site and course web pages are a treasure trove of useful
resources on theory construction, with rich information on theory
building and the nature of theoretical adequacy. To learn more, go to
URL:

  http://www.csom.umn.edu/faculty-research/faculty.aspx?x500=avandeve

For a short over-view, I can suggest my article 

Friedman, Ken. 2003. “Theory construction in design research:
criteria: approaches, and methods.” Design Studies, 24 (2003),
507–522.

It is available on the Design Studies web site, or you can find the
author’s final draft at URL:

  http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/25614

The slightly more comprehensive conference paper is:

Friedman, Ken. 2002. “Theory Construction in Design Research.
Criteria, Approaches, and Methods.” In Common Ground. Proceedings of
the Design Research Society International Conference at Brunel
University, September 5-7, 2002. David Durling and John Shackleton,
Editors. Stoke on Trent, UK: Staffordshire University Press, 388-414.

It is available at URL:

 http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/41967

The conventional approach to building theory in a field is to ground
new theoretical and conceptual advances on established theories in the
existing literature. Identifying the errors in the existing theory
foundation is a different task: that of Schumpeterian destruction of
much of the established culture and theory basis of the existing field
of design. A few design researchers such as Don, have already embarked
on this task

The difference in purpose between theory building and theory
destruction implies a different sort of approach to using the literature
of the design field. It is a different task even from that of Einstein,
who was in effect building an extension of existing theory (in the sense
that relativity offered an extension of theories of dynamics beyond the
scope of Newtonian dynamics).

4. Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction 

Joseph Schumpeter (1975: 81-89) describes the “process of creative
destruction” in a chapter of his most famous book, Capitalism,
Socialism, and Democracy. For Schumpeter, this is a stage in the
historical development of capitalist economies, and it describes the way
that innovative firms and processes sweep older firms and processes
away.

This addresses economics, not theory building. For those who want to
read more, see:

Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1975. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New
York: Harper Torchbooks.

I don’t see the process of building better theories or replacing
older theories with new theories as a process resembling Schumpeter’s
idea of creative destruction except as a loose metaphor.

What Don Norman is doing is what scientists and scholars always do.
Debating ideas, offering propositions, and finding ways to test and
apply them. This is the process that Thomas Kuhn describes as normal
science. When debates get hot enough and problems big enough, we
sometimes develop new approaches. Kuhn describes this as a paradigm
shift.

While I understand your point, I don’t see this as a “Schumpeterian
destruction of design.” Rather, I see this as the process of
development that takes place in any immature field as it develops toward
maturity. 

Once again, I see the way forward as using the resources and
opportunities available to us to develop the field through better
education, through better research training, by developing our young
scholars and researchers more effectively, and by improving our own
conceptual and theoretical skills.

Warm wishes,

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


Terry Love wrote:

—snip—

One issue I felt concerned you addressed only peripherally in your post
is the practical diagnosis and remedy of the conceptual problems in the
literature. How we fix the situation is important and would seem to go
beyond simply using the existing literature more or better.

Conceptual theory failures are an issue particular adversely
significant to the development of the research field in the trajectory
of thinking and literature in design research and design.

Conceptual and theory failures typically initially occur in simplistic
analyses where their consequences are usually limited or insignificant.
Then, once established in the literature in the manner you described,
these misconceptions often become uncritically adopted as foundations
for more advanced theorymaking. The outcome is body of faulty advanced
research literature based on poor conceptual foundations.

Typically, identifying such conceptual gaffes merely requires critical
epistemological analyses that can be sharp and short. Commonly, in
practical terms, it can be achieved by relatively simple composition of
analytical deductions already established by others; usually outside the
design field. Often, to identify significant conceptual problems only
requires identifying a major contradiction between assumptions
foundational to the design literature and empirical observations.
Usually these contradictions and the failures of theory are obvious once
described. 

Examples of areas where conceptualisation can be easily challenged in
epistemological terms and problems in conceptualisation can be found
are: design activity, thinking, design processes, the role of emotions
in design, participation of others, partial designs, designs of systems,
models of design organisations, national roles of design, role of
drawing in design, role of design research in design practice, and
lateral and rational thinking in design.

Identifying such conceptual problems in the design theory literature is
urgent because the snowballing of adverse affects they cause in the
theory base of design as newer literature references older literature in
the way you described.

To me, this seems to be an area of design research that, whilst
requiring authors to have a depth of reading in the design research
literature, justifiably requires relatively minimum reference to
literature in published analyses. At most, discussion may require a
little referencing of a small number of examples. The alternative, a
detailed historical review and critique of every example of the
literature that demonstrates the problem would seem a waste of time and
unnecessarily unpleasant to those who had unwittingly used problematic
concepts.

The conventional approach to building theory in a field is to ground
new theoretical and conceptual advances on established theories in the
existing literature. Identifying the errors in the existing theory
foundation is a different task: that of Schumpeterian destruction of
much of the established culture and theory basis of the existing field
of design. A few design researchers such as Don, have already embarked
on this task

The difference in purpose between theory building and theory
destruction implies a different sort of approach to using the literature
of the design field. It is a different task even from that of Einstein,
who was in effect building an extension of existing theory (in the sense
that relativity offered an extension of theories of dynamics beyond the
scope of Newtonian dynamics).

I welcome your thoughts on the role of literacy in supporting such
Schumpeterian destruction of design. 

—snip—