Dear Ken
I've always found your posts very helpful. But I wish here to inject something that may perhaps balance what you say. I wonder if we need to interrogate your claim that designers should do design research. Of course this on first reading makes complete sense, but it is, at the same time something I find, on reflection, controversial. Some of the examples you quote, such as Don Norman's work (which I've read with great appreciation) support your notion that designers have that certain viewpoint that is proper to being designerly (if I may), which is to service the needs of the clients and to answer the very questions the clients pose, to be client/user centered. But perhaps here I am reminded of Clive Dilnot's worry that the critical in design is difficult to come into view in typical design discourse, for a variety of reasons, whether in practice or in research, and therefore your account of what is designerly, which designers (you seem to think) grasp so well, may in fact, ironically, totally eschew a criticality that Dilnot wishes researchers to think about in relation to design. Might that be a problem, not only for designing, but also for uncovering what design really is or should be? What is 'design' it seems to me is always 'design' from someone's normative, evaluative viewpoint, and a valid question, I suggest, is to ask whether the designer, as design researcher, necessarily, typically, or even naturally has the best normative viewpoint with which to detail 'design'. In other words, contrary to your evaluation of Frayling, I might say that the very reason he did not bring the field forward is precisely because he suggested that designers should be design researchers. What do you think?
No plans to start a quarrel, this is in fact something I am working on, without much success.
Very best
Jude
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken Friedman
Sent: Thursday, 28 June, 2012 3:36 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Research Through Design
Dear Martin,
This is a quick follow-up to my prior post. A crucial typographical error appears in my note. Where I wrote of Frayling's essay: "The lack of experience and expertise in design and design research explains was he was unable to address design research effectively." the sentence should have read:
"His [Frayling's] lack of experience and expertise in design and design research explains WHY he was unable to address design research effectively."
In arguing that Frayling's essay Frayling’s essay was a step backward that took people away from the pioneering work of people such as Buckminster Fuller and Don Norman, I am arguing that Frayling wrote a speculative essay that essentially treated research by artists and research by designers as roughly the same thing. This is because Frayling failed to distinguish between art as a creative personal inquiry in which the artist works for art's sake and design as a creative service-focused enterprise in which the designer solve problems for clients, customers, and end-users. The essay is really a speculative note on art research by an art historian and scholar of spaghetti Westerns that directs attention away from design research by working designers.
It should be noted that Buckminster Fuller's design work and design research began in the 1920s, long predating Frayling's essay. The same is true for much of Don Norman's work, including the seminal book now titled The Design of Everyday Things. This book first appeared in 1988 as The Psychology of Everyday Things. While Norman was at that time a professor of psychology, he was also a practicing designer and engineer, a consultant to industry, and he had long written on user-centered design.
In my view, Frayling did not help the field to advance. The good part of his essay was the notion that designers could engage in research. This notion was not new. The problematic part was equating design with art, while suggesting that Read's method of learning art through practice was also a method of answering research questions in design. As long as design involves solving problems for stakeholders whose problems we help to solve, the methods we use must be defined by the problems that give rise to the questions we must answer.
Yours,
Ken
National Institute of Education (Singapore) http://www.nie.edu.sg
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