(A longish message -- sorry; one of my pet topics...)
I believe that the point Don is making is that while we may not need
Science with capital S we are still needing science with small s...
When "Science" is a quest for General, Global, and Timeless Truths,
"science" can be interpreted as systematic cooperation to stepwise
improve common understanding through comparisons of results of
empirical experiments, that can be made understandable and
intelligible to others based on shared assumptions, concepts and
theories upon which they are constructed. I fully agree.
However, there is a caveat: when working with an object matter of
historical nature, we should be careful that Science does not seep
back into science. A historical object matter is one where the
current status has been influenced by what has happened in the past,
and where what is now happening will change how things will be in the
future. In this sense, design is historical through and through, as
is everything else related to cultural humans. There is no stepping
twice into the same cultural river.
With any matter of historical nature, "explicit replication" becomes
a subject of careful deliberation. Every time when we do something we
are dealing with to some extent unique local, particular and timely
issues; how much and what we can generalize from them? The
experimental procedures with which natural sciences have successfully
produced general, global and timeless knowledge may not be our best
guides anymore, and at least they should not be the only guides.
With historical matter the knowledge has an half-life, too: during
the last 50 years the average height of male population in Finland
has grown 6 cm: good for Finnish basketball, but it has made the old
ergonomic studies rather unreliable as guides for practical design.
This is easy to see and correct, but what about less easily
observable cultural changes -- when they will make an old study not
comparable anymore? Where do we need to look?
Fortunately enough, we are not expected to produce Global, General,
and Timeless knowledge, but only something that will be practically
useful at least a while; but even then the step from purely local,
particular, and timely (as in action research or in a design case)
towards something a bit more general and transferrable is hard. That
is and will be our challenge, one around which many current debates
("design-as-research") are running.
The transforming of the world by design is something we should see as
a rare and valuable epistemological asset; every action research and
design case may not serve as science per se, but we should be able to
see them as experiments where new information is produced -- that
beyond the level of immediately useful local, particular and timely
there is also something that can be used to answer a larger question
and compared to other similar experiments. Then we could talk about
design science...
But this would need enough shared baseline assumptions, concepts and
theories that could make it possible, and that is the area where we
are still waiting for advances.
I have explored this issue a bit more in a paper "Out of the Shadow
of Simon: Artifacts, Practices, and History in Design Research"
written for Doctoral Education in Design Conference, Hong Kong
23-25.5.2011. The proceedings of the conference have been in the
making already a while... so the paper can be downloaded from
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/57895612/Out_of_the_Shadow.pdf
best regards,
--Kari Kuutti
University of Oulu, Finland
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