Dear Ken,
Thank you for your comments.
>> Wow. I vote with Gunnar on this. Come on, Terry. There is no obvious PhD
thesis in Jaime Henriquez's rant. A guy with technical skill and extensive
experience observes the naive behaviors of those who lack his experience to
find them ignorant, and he labels ignorant behavior as superstition. So?
<endsnip>
I think the issue is worth looking at in more detail, and that there is a
game changing dimension to the issues pointed to in the link.
The link raised the issue that users' behaviours may, in many cases, be
explained by some particular patterns of thinking.
Specifically, the author focused on situations in which the users technical
knowledge and skills were insufficient for the user to have a sound
understanding of the behaviour of a designed outcome and as a result led to
inappropriate decisions by the user.
The author suggested that when users are in this situation of needing to
make decisions with insufficient knowledge, a common response is to apply
knowledge from other areas of their life experience, even when it is
inappropriate and leads to odd decisions. More specifically, he drew
attention to decisions in which the user would make judgements that require
assuming the world operated in some magical way.
This situation and pattern of behaviour strikes me as being especially
interesting for design research, and potentially in a game changing way for
several areas of design theory and practice.
Firstly, it is interesting because this unusual, and apparently common,
behaviour set is currently not well addressed in the best user theories in
design research.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the situation described above is one
in which designers typically operate. If designers' thinking is also marked
by magical assumptions then this is significant in terms of theorising about
design process and design thinking/cognition. It is also potentially very
significant in terms of design evaluation and quality processes in 4H design
situations and even in situations in which design outputs have significant
financial and strategic implications for business and government. For
example, it's reasonable to ask, 'Is it of concern if designers of nuclear
power plants use magical thinking as the basis of their design decisions?'.
Taken together, the above considerations seem like significant justification
for some research to review this situation. The mix of epistemological and
practical issues indicate that the research needs to be undertaken at
doctoral or post-doctoral level.
Below is an outline PhD proposal for such a research project shaped to be of
a similar scale to recent Design PhDs I've examined.
Best wishes,
Terry
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Dr Terence Love, [log in to unmask], +61 (0)8 9305 7629
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PHD APPLICATION
Research Problem
Existing design theory does not address well the significant evidence of
erroneous user and designer behaviour being shaped by thinking that might be
described as 'magical', 'superstitious' , or 'based on incommensurate
archetypes'. This typically occurs when the technical knowledge of the
designer and user is less than what is needed to understand and predict the
behaviour of the actualised design output or appropriate interaction.
The form of these types of thinking offers the potential for direct
specification of characteristics of designs. This is not possible with the
much of the findings of current design research into designerly thinking and
creativity, interaction design, usability etc., except where it is based on
biological phenomena. This is because existing design research in these
areas is either associative rather than causal (e.g. identifying typical
users' behaviours in relation to a designed object); focuses on the design
process; or, focuses on the characteristics of the designed output
As such, the research problem that the proposed research addresses has two
dimensions that apply both to designers and users of designed outputs:
a) filling a gap in existing knowledge and theory; and
b) providing a potential theory foundation that will enable future
researchers better to be able to identify directive design specifications
for particular design situations.
Overview
The proposed research is empirical and exploratory. It will use a
combination of video recordings of depth interviews with designers and
users, and conceptual theoretical analysis of relevant literature,
particularly from Psychology, the Philosophy of Cognition and Sociology.
These will be used to identify the main factors involved in the phenomena
under consideration and their relationship to and, if necessary, replacement
or modification of, existing concepts and theories in the design theory
literature. The research will identify the implications of the findings for
developing direct specifications of characteristics of design solutions in
particular design contexts such as visual communication, user interfaces,
and system affordances where the technical knowledge needed for
understanding exceeds what is available by the designer and user.
Research data collection and analysis methods
The researcher will first review the concepts and theories relating to
'magical and 'superstitious' thinking, erroneous thinking, cargo cult
thinking, and thinking 'based on incommensurate archetypes' in the
literature of Psychology, the Philosophy of Cognition and Sociology. This
will form the theory background for this research. Theories and concepts of
the design research literature relevant to the topic will be mapped against
this background literature and tested for epistemological consistency,
coherence and completeness with it, identifying any gaps and inconsistences.
Up to five 'research questions' that this research will be identified via
the above literature review. The questions will be chosen to address the
research problem as far as can be managed within the scope and resources of
a PhD. These questions will be answered using a combination of the above
review of literature and the findings of the following depth interviews.
Video recorded, depth (semi-structured) interviews will be undertaken with
30 purposively-chosen participants divided equally across the three realms
of design previously identified by Love (ref): viz. 'technical' design
fields, 'art and design' design fields, and 'other' design fields. An
example would be 10 participants each from Engineering design, Graphic
design, and Educational assessment design. For each of the three realms,
five participants will be designers and five participants will be direct
users of the outputs of designs in that realm. The focus of the interviews
will be on eliciting designers and users' personal explanations of
interactions and functioning of designs for which they do not have
sufficient technical knowledge to understand and predict their behaviours
correctly. The interviews will be structured by questions that elicit
information to answer the research questions derived in the review of theory
and concepts in the literature described above.
Analysis of the interview data will be in terms of identifying themes in
explanations that fall under the rubric of 'magical', 'superstitious' , or
'based on incommensurate archetypes'. The interview data will be analysed
using the concepts and theories from Psychology, the Philosophy of Cognition
and Sociology identified as relevant in the review of the literature. Both
the interviews and the analysis of the interviews will be directed by the
research questions identified in the review of literature.
Thesis structure
The thesis will comprise 5 sections.
The first section will provide an executive overview of the PhD research. It
will describe the research problem, its significance, the development of the
research questions, a brief description of the methods used, an outline of
the findings form the research analyses, and a brief description of the
implications of the outcomes of the analyses for addressing the research
problem and their other theoretical and practical implications.
The second section of the thesis will describe in detail the author's
conceptual, theoretical and epistemological analysis of the literature of
Psychology, the Philosophy of Cognition and Sociology as their concepts and
theories pertain to the research problem. It will also provide a detailed
comparison of the findings with a similar review of the literature from the
design research realm. From these analyses, the candidate will derive and
define up to five research questions to be answered by this research that
will together contribute to addressing the research problem of this PhD.
The third section will describe the choice of data collection and analysis
methods and the methodological reasoning behind their choice including
specific caveats and delimitations identified prior to the start of the
research. It is expected that some of the data collection and analysis
methods will involve revisiting the conceptual and theoretical material from
the literature of Psychology, the Philosophy of Cognition, Sociology and
Design Research reviewed earlier.
The fourth section of the PhD thesis will describe in detail, without
discussion, the outcomes of the analyses intended to answer the research
questions. Raw data such as transcriptions of the depth interviews, and the
details of analytical methods, will be reported in the thesis in appendices.
The fifth and concluding section of the PhD thesis will discuss how the
findings from the data collection and analyses answer the research questions
and address the research problem. In addition, this concluding section will
identify the implications of the findings of the research for corrections
and revision of existing areas of design theory; development of future
design theory; design research, particularly relating to user behaviour,
collaborative design activities, and individual design cognition; design
practices in sundry realms of design; design education; and the work of
design institutions that interface with government and industry
organisations and the public. In addition, this final section of the thesis
will identify future research direction and lessons learned from undertaking
this research.
<end>
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