Dear Birger,

Let me start here. I do not have a "principally negative position towards practice-based research" for the following reasons:

1. I do not have a principled stance on method. Rather, I have a principled stance on the status of claims to knowledge, and a strong conviction that such claims be substantiated when they impact the lives of others. That places a burden of responsibility on those claiming the veracity of certain statements. I believe this because of the unsubstantiated claims used to direct the organs of state power. Claims for example (based on phrenology) that Jews were less evolved than Aryans, for example. That claim was unsubstantiated — not just because it was based on genocidal racism which is morally abhorrent — but because the claims to scientific veracity were utterly baseless and false, and yet were held up as true and acted upon. If we are committed to the careful substantiation of claims, and are repulsed by Sophistry, then we must ask "how do you know that" when people make claims to knowledge. I fail to see how anyone working in design (IF they are doing research-based work, and I fully accept many are not, and that's fine) can be, or should be, exempt from this standard. You're the only people who don't need to prove why something is true?

2. A field is most welcome to define its own perspectives and approaches so long as they are grounded in exactly the same base fo substantiation the rest of us are subjected to. Design is not — and has no right to be — an exception. We can see that by merely replacing some words: You seem to oppose attempts made in the phrenology research community to define its own perspectives and approaches." Well, if its baseless, then it has nothing to do with design per se. It has to do with any effort that purports to substantial knowledge but will not make the necessary steps required to demonstrate it. There is nothing about "design" that militates against the creation of such knowledge. There is, however, an evident camp of people who militate against the requirement to do so.

3. I'm not going to make strong statements about "practice-based research" until those who claim to be doing it can explain exactly what it is, and how it is different from (and does not need to follow the rules of) logical substantiation. LEARNING is not RESEARCH. Learning took place in nursing all the time. But the RESEARCH was about the effort to determine HOW the learning was happening so it could be made evident and subject to systematic study. 

4. If you learn something by designing something, you have two choices. Just learn it and keep it to yourself, or learn it and try to demonstrate that learning by making a claim (i.e. doing something by X is better than by Y, in conditions Z) and then trying to substantiate it. Failing to do the latter is NOT acceptable. Why? Because an assertion of the veracity of something, absent a warrant and statement of reason makes it impossible to hold that claim up to scrutiny. And that means you are NOT engaged in a discussion about the veracity of claims. 

5. Design's "immaturity" is an issue if it claims some sort of exceptionalism. I hear it all the time yet have thus far run across nothing whatsoever to justify it other than people wanting to be taken seriously; having learned what "taken seriously"  means in the academy; wanting some of that; but refusing to do the actual work. 

I want to stand by as well my earlier point that research activity may NOT be relevant to the performance of many, many acts of design, and may be utterly irrelevant to doing a lot of it to the highest possible standards. Just as writing a novel (mine is now out in Norway), does not require a deep knowledge of literature, and certainly does not require any research in the field of literature (I haven't studied literature since the late 80s in college). But when design purports to be doing research, it needs to step up. And when it makes claims that have impact over the lives of others, it damn well better step up or else it will continue to find people like me standing there with a more than disapproving look. 

This really into the space to get into it, but I don't have the same reading over the history of ethnography. "Participatory" research is not an evolution to interpretative anthropology, but a branch. It did not replace the attempt to come to "understanding of understandings not our own" as Clifford Geertz phrased it. But the "post-colonialist" movement — largely Marxist inspired — moved away of interpretive anthropology towards  "empowerment" which I don't think even claims to try to reach understandings of local social systems. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. But I've never reach any convincing action research. The ONLY exception being Ruth Payne (Ph.D.) who was on the SNAP team, does excellent work, and now runs www.bellandpayne.org. Of course, I like to tell her she's not doing action research, and she says she's "redefining it." Then we laugh at each other and throw food.

Derek
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On Oct 16, 2011, at 10:54 AM, Birger Sevaldson wrote:

> Dear Derek
> You seem to oppose the attempts made in the design research community to define its own perspectives and approaches (in addition to established ones). Keeping the pub metaphor in mind, may i suggest that this is a normal historical process in knowledge domains that we have seen in many fields, e.g. ethnography. They typically seem to emerge in new domains when "traditional" methods and perspectives are exhausted. In ethnography there was a remarkable shift from distanced observation to participatory observation. In the case of design this roughly means that perspectives from humanistic and natural sciences only, are seen as insufficient to us. What we see at the moment is a similar shift from distanced positions towards immersed positions, regarding the investigative elements in the process of designing as potentially interesting when coupled with better and more systematic reflection. These processes of shifts towards new perspectives in knowledge production might be conducted well or less well, and we might be at mature or immature stages in this development, But do you really principally oppose this?
> 
> You also seem to have a principally negative position towards practice based research in general and research by design especial. Practice based research is found and established in many fields e.g. nursing. One can dislike this but it is not an extreme position to talk of practice based research in design. We can discuss if its done well or not or how it should be improved but you seem to principally deny its relevance. 
> 
> Design research draws from and leans on many different modes of knowledge production and at the same time we might agree that it is immature and therefore we face big challenges. I agree that we have ways to go but to disregard this diversity is not helping us forward. Forgive me if i read you wrongly and reminding i am in pub mode :)
> 
> I would love your comments on my paper where i try to map out the diversity of design research with a weight on practice related modes. Here it is:
> http://www.formakademisk.org/index.php/formakademisk/article/view/62 
> 
> All the best
> Birger
> 
> 
> ________________________________________
> Fra: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [[log in to unmask]] på vegne av Derek B. Miller [[log in to unmask]]
> Sendt: 14. oktober 2011 09:41
> Til: [log in to unmask]
> Emne: Re: Plato's view of the academy
> 
> I second this analysis.
> 
> There is a great deal of discussion here — much of it I have found very disheartening — about what research is, and whether design doctoral students should be held to some familiar standards (yes, they should). I see a worrying attempt to both appropriate the term "research" while trying to redefine its elements to accommodate only what designers do, or worse, want to do.
> 
> Sticking with the Greeks for a second (and please do read "The Legacy of Greek Philosophy" by Bernard Williams, which began like this: "The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy"), Aristotle's On Rhetoric was about how to make arguments. Not those that the sophists made, but good ones. Ones that had virtue and therefore could help lead the assembly to virtuous conduct.
> 
> Our doctoral students today, across the spectrum of disciplines (all of which are under 200 years old), will be called on in professional life, and expected through public expectation, to be able to make better arguments. Better claims about the veracity of other claims. Be able to reflect on practice and provide insight into its conduct. Whether this is a Ph.D. in literature, or art history, or political science or physics, I strongly suggest that this statement remains the same.
> 
> If design students do not master the fundamental skills needed to differentiate good arguments from bad ones (and yes, this is about METHOD), then they have not mastered the skills worthy of the title, "doctor of philosophy."
> 
> No one can answer every question. But the reason why well trained scholars (and it is a form of training) can read work outside their immediate field and see errors (if not always omissions) is because they have some basic training in how arguments are constructed and help together or undermined.
> 
> A Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) is an outstanding degree by and for practitioners. I have a BA from Sarah Lawrence College — a brilliant school and perhaps the best I attended, which included Georgetown and two schools at Oxford as well. Poets were taught by poets, and novelists by other novelists. These people did NOT necessarily have a Ph.D., and one would have been useless. That wasn't the task. And those who did have a Ph.D. in literature taught the history, structure, form and meaning of books, genres, and epochs. They didn't even try to reach how to write a good story.
> 
> If design Ph.Ds can't do what I need them to do as Director of The Policy Lab, I — and many others — will not turn to your students with our questions. We'll go to better scholars. You will position yourself in the world of your own making.
> 
> I strongly recommended you don't turn the design doctorate into a source of ridicule. If you want Ph.Ds and not (only) MFAs, then its time to ante up. The arguments I've read here about practice-as-research are now — 12 months into reading this list — utterly unconvincing to me. Practice can lead to learning. Not to "research" unless one aims to study the learning itself.
> 
> And a list serve, by the way, should NOT be the place where these issues are settled. These discussions are like pub conversations AFTER work in London. Fun, stimulating, and helpful to direct the mind towards things, but proof of nothing and not the place or space to make decisions about higher education.
> 
> Derek Miller
> _________________
> Dr. Derek B. Miller
> Director
> 
> The Policy Lab
> 321 Columbus Ave.
> Seventh Floor of the Electric Carriage House
> Boston, MA 02116
> United States of America
> 
> Phone
> +1 617 440 4409
> Twitter
> @Policylabtweets
> Web
> www.thepolicylab.org
> 
> This e-mail includes proprietary and confidential information belonging to The Policy Lab, Ltd. All rights reserved.
> 
> On Oct 14, 2011, at 1:49 AM, Ken Friedman wrote:
> 
>> Dear Eduardo,
>> 
>> Not joking at all. This was Plato's view.
>> 
>> Plato would have understood the university as an academy because the university curriclum resembled Plato's own curriculum. This is especially true of the medieval universities where the lower faculties taught the trivium and the quadrivium.
>> 
>> Plato would not have understood the art academies as academies in his sense of the word. The practical arts did not exist in Plato's academy or in any other Greek academies from the fifth century BCE through the disestablishment of the academies by Emperor Justinian a millennium later. In Plato's time, craftsmen, artists, and architects learned their skill by working in a studio, just as navigators or soldiers learned their skill through sailing or warfare. The academies dealt with philosophy and the specific range of knowledge embodied in episteme. The artisans, artists, and architects of the time -- and all other practitioners of an art -- learned their arts and skills at work in the practical setting. This was the range or knowledge embodied in techne.
>> 
>> Plato had little room in his Republic for poets, but he knew what poetry was. The making arts were so far off his conceptual map that he did deal with them in the academy, any more than he taught farming or agriculture. We all need to eat, but Plato treated growing food as something he assumed others would think about and manage. Philosophers, those who governed the academy, did something else and thought about something else.
>> 
>> This is not a reasonable approach to education in our world, but Plato lived and worked 2,500 years ago and he saw things differently. I did not state my views: I stated Plato's views, and Plato would not have recognized an art academy as an academy like how own. One may imagine Plato's response to the modern university of the 1500s or the contemporary university today if he arrived in a time machine and had a chance to think things through. Nevertheless, that is science fiction, and it is quite different to saying what the original Plato would have thought of an academy teaching art, architecture, craft, or design.
>> 
>> Yours,
>> 
>> Ken
>> 
>> 
>> Sent from my iPad
>> 
>> On Oct 14, 2011, at 12:47 AM, "Eduardo Corte Real <[log in to unmask]>" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>>> "Plato would have understood the university as academy. He would
>>> not have considered the curriculum in art academies academic, even though
>>> they used the word academic."
>>> 
>>> You got to be joking
>>> 
>>> Eduardo