Dear Amanda,

It’s my sense that you did not read my earlier response carefully
enough. I answered your question. I quoted the comment on “years of
endnoted interrogation of design canons” to address part of this
issue, but I also addressed the question you raised with respect to
social networks and disciplinary authority.

I stated that there is already a social network mechanism that fulfills
this purpose, and I argued that the university is such a mechanism. I
pointed the a wide rage of institutions that also constitute such a
mechanism. And I agreed that there might also be other forms. You have
raised the possibility twice now. We’ve both agreed that it is
possible. Many things are possible. The issue is to propose such “a
scholarly, rigorous approach to socially networked knowledge
production” that works. You haven’t offered a workable proposal,
you’ve only raised the questions. So far, my argument is that
universities and the other mechanisms I described do the job quite
well.

[Amanda Bill quote begins]

Thanks for your attempts to keep some clarity around this topic.

To that end, I’d like to point out that you’ve taken my comment
about interrogation of design canons out of context.

You wrote -snip- To speak of “years of endnoted interrogation of
design canons” misses the point of literacy. -snip-

However I wasn’t referring to literacy, literature reviews or even
plumbing here. I was suggesting that old publishing paradigms are not
the only ways that disciplinary ‘authority’ is established these
days, and that maybe we could consider using new modes of social
networking, but in ways that are still scholarly and rigorous. In this,
I was replying to your earlier point about Mendeley being a social
networking site and hence an inappropriate platform for assembling a
reading list.

[Amanda Bill quote ends]

Perhaps I misunderstood you, but I did not quote you out of context.
Your posted was headed, “” You raised the issues I addressed. And
the issue of literacy in the larger sense does, indeed, incorporate the
concept of disciplinary authority. That is part of knowing and using
useful literature. It is the ability to select wisely among authors whom
one may take as authoritative in some respect. That, in any field, is
literacy.

Let’s start by taking Mendeley off the table. It clearly doesn’t
work. Mendeley is something rather like Twitter or Facebook, just not as
popular or profitable.

You also wrote that some people at your university are getting research
credits and research funding for social networking rather than for
published research. I’m not sure how to take that. At my university,
you don’t get research credit or research funding for social
networking. You’ve got to produce research that others can read,
understand, adapt, and apply to their own work in some way. That’s
normally done through publications of some kind, though there are other
forms of research production that others can adopt, adapt, and apply to
their own work, including patents or unpublished papers.

If your university has some special form of socially networked research
production, I’d be curious to know what it is and how it works. As I
understood your post, you’re just about to submit a journal article
that comes at the tail end of a decade-long research process. That
sounds more like research as I understand it.

Now people may be getting rewards and funds for something that
doesn’t really measure up to any reasonable standard of research.
There are universities where you can get a PhD for an exhibition of
paintings and a 20,000-word essay. There are universities that treat an
art show, a dance, or a room full of teapots as a research output. That
doesn’t mean that a teapot is a research output. It means that the
university in question makes a choice that may not serve well in the
long run.

After describing your decade of work, you write that, “colleagues who
have built extraordinarily high web-profiles, but have no time for
traditional scholarship, are being rewarded for projects that my
university chooses to classify as research.” The operative statement
here is that your university “chooses to classify” a high web
profile as research. That does not mean that this is a reasonable
choice.

Before offering a few final thoughts, I will post again what I wrote
before. I hope this demonstrates an answer to your question. Without
saying that you need to agree, I do say that I answered your question in
the context of the literacy thread, as you asked it, with respect to the
disciplinary literature of the field:

[Ken Friedman quote begins]

(3) Content counts, not the storage system or the software. […] To
speak of “years of endnoted interrogation of design canons” misses
the point of literacy. Literacy entails knowing and using the useful
literature. But this is not simply a matter of a canon in the sense of
an historical, philosophical, or literary canon. In any field of
research connected linked with an applied profession such as medicine,
law, or design, literacy also entails understanding and applying
empirical, conceptual, and theoretical research.

The issue is not a matter of interrogating the canon. The issue
involves interrogating the human and physical world, using theoretical,
conceptual, and empirical literature as tools in the process of
interrogation.

[…]

(5) Amanda concludes her post with a profound question. “Is it
possible to design a scholarly, rigorous approach to socially networked
knowledge production?”

There are three answers I can think of off-hand, all of them good.

The first is that we already have a scholarly, rigorous approach to
socially networked knowledge production. One major tool for this
approach is the university, along with the larger network of parallel
linked tools including journals, research councils, university presses,
scholarly and scientific societies, and the like. Universities do what
they do very well indeed. While research universities struggle to carry
on in the global era of austerity, they remain effective mechanisms for
“a scholarly, rigorous approach to socially networked knowledge
production.”

If you’re curious about this system, how it evolved, what it does and
how it works, I wrote a fair amount about the history of the university
in

Friedman, Ken. 2003. “Design Curriculum Challenges for Today’s
University.” [Keynote conference lecture.] Enhancing the Curricula:
Exploring Effective Curricula Practices in Art, Design and Communication
in Higher Education. Center for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design.
First International Conference at the Royal Institute of British
Architects (RIBA) London, UK, 10th - 12th April 2002. Co-sponsored by
ELIA (European League of Institutes of Arts) and ADC-LTSN (The Art,
Design and Communication - Learning and Teaching Support Network).
London: CLTAD, The London Institute, 29-63.

A PDF copy is available at URL:

 http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/47336

The paper itself offers a fairly brief overview, but the reference list
will lead you to a rich series of resources that describe how the modern
research university evolved, and how it manages to provide “a
scholarly, rigorous approach to socially networked knowledge
production.”

The second answer is that universities are not the only such
mechanisms. The world supports a wide range of socially networked
knowledge production organizations. Many of these are scholarly and
rigorous in their approach. I won’t list them all here, but they
include serious newspapers and magazines (The New York Times, The
Economist); government research organizations and private research
organization that do contract work for government (CSIRO [Australia],
Mind Lab [Denmark], Policy Lab [USA], VTT [Finland], SITRA [Finland],
and many more); effective private companies (in design, IDEO is a
well-known example, as are the research arms of Intel, Apple, IBM, and
many more); as well as thousands of other examples, public, private, and
hybrid.

The third answer is that there must certainly be new ways to develop
“a scholarly, rigorous approach to socially networked knowledge
production.” Human beings are always evolving, creating, and designing
such systems.

What doesn’t work are systems that operate on the notion that a group
of ill-informed and often ignorant contributors will develop a “a
scholarly, rigorous approach to socially networked knowledge
production” by aggregating the products of uninformed opinion.

[Ken Friedman quote ends]

Authority depends to a great degree on expertise, knowledge, and the
wisdom to apply them well. There is no absolute guarantee for any of
these, but the reputation that attends an author’s name serves as a
reasonable proxy because reputation demonstrates a record of achievement
that demonstrates the an author’s expertise, knowledge, and wisdom. In
effect, reputation is a marker for authority.

Reputation serves the same functions for a journal, a research center,
a university, or a conference series.

For this reason, anonymous web-based social media don’t work and
won’t serve as a substitute. Neither will web-based social media
where the uninformed and ignorant have the same access or editorial
standing as genuine experts.

One reason that Wikipedia has so many stubs and so few robust
contributions is that any cheerful enthusiast can erase or revise a
carefully prepared article. While the Wikipedia idea interested me, I
stopped contributing after a couple of go-rounds on a topic where I am a
subject-field expert. After explaining my view in the Wikipedia
back-channel system, I realized that a Wiki enthusiast with many
articles to his credit would always take precedence, despite the fact
that I have several major books and book chapters on this topic from
leading academic publisher, as well as a significant number of
peer-reviewed journal articles and special journal issues. Wikipedia can
often be an interesting starting point, but you’ve got to know enough
to know the limits. Many of the amateur contributors have nothing other
than enthusiasm, and the Wikipedia system will always privilege a
dedicated amateur over an expert with no final review mechanism and no
avenue of appeal. When I have written encyclopedia articles (the real
kind, not the Wiki kind), I find it takes about two weeks to produce
1,000 words pitched at the broad general audience of an encyclopedia.
Few writers are willing to spend this kind of time on a Wikipedia entry
that can vanish at the blink of an amateur eye.

Compare the with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This is an
open access, web-based reference work. It’s editorial and publishing
models represent the highest standards of academic excellence. To learn
more, visit URL:

 http://plato.stanford.edu/

These articles are always the author’s best efforts. Whether I agree
with an article or not, I know wrote it and I can measure their
authority in a reasonable way. Contrast this with the huge number of
Wikipedians writing under pen-names that make it impossible to know who
they are or what expertise they possess.

While the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is “a scholarly,
rigorous approach to socially networked knowledge production” that
works, it works because it borrows and builds on the traditions of the
university to develop an authoritative contribution to the disciplinary
literature of its field.

If you can propose something similar for design that reaches the same
standards, I’d welcome it.

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