Dear Chuck,
Thanks for your reply. I’m puzzled by the idea that robust methods
are anything other than relevant and rigorous. What else would they be?
The Oxford English Dictionary offers several definitions for robust.
These seem to be the relevant definitions. In general, robust means
“Strong and hardy; strongly and solidly built, sturdy; healthy.”
In statistics, and in some areas of research, the definition is more
specific: “Of a test: yielding approximately correct results despite
the falsity of certain of the assumptions underlying it; (of a
calculation, process, or result) largely independent of certain aspects
of the input.” In computing – and likely in some areas of design:
“Of a program: able to recover from errors; unlikely to fail,
reliable. Also: (of a program's feature set) powerful, full.”
Robustness does not mean “training in many methods of little interest
or value to the candidate.” The purpose of training people in multiple
methods allows for triangulation across methods and it allows for a
broader choice among methods for answering a question or solving a
problem. Robustness has to do with the value and uses of the method
itself. Robust training has to do with the quality of the training and,
finally, with the skills and quality of the researcher.
All serious research requires robust methods. Every research field has
appropriate methods.
The subject head to this thread is “research through design.” While
I’ve made some broad general assertions about the nature of the PhD, I
have framed these assertions in the context of doctoral education in
design – and the gaps in many of the programs in our field.
The report that Luke Feast gave from his recent experience and the
example I report (Friedman 2010) represent a common problem. I recently
met a colleague from Europe who moved here to teach at the university
described in my example. He tells me that the research methods training
program is a two-day block of lectures. He was asked to teach
qualitative research methods in 90 minutes.
Research methods appropriate to historians differ to research methods
appropriate to people who undertake research in automotive design,
software design, or furniture design. One must still study a range of
issues in history, historiography, and human cultural development under
different names. Depending on one’s field of history, there are other
ranges of information one requires. And within each of these fields,
there are issues one must address.
Everyone who designs products or services that human beings use needs a
range of basic understanding that likely cross several fields. Most
people who work in interdisciplinary design teams or interdisciplinary
research teams will need enough common knowledge to speak and work
productively with all members of the team. Once again, the skills that
Rugg and Petre (2004: 6-7)
My concern has been the number of people awarded a PhD who are unable
to do relevant or rigorous research of any kind. Every time we announce
a position requiring a PhD and an appropriate record of research for the
level of appointment, we receive a significant number of applicants who
simply aren’t qualified. This includes junior appointments whose PhD
theses are marked by a basic lack of skills – the skill sets that Rugg
and Petre describe as fundamental for earning a PhD.
There is a gorilla in the room that few people on this list have been
willing to acknowledge or address. These are the issues that Don Norm
(2010) discusses in “Why Design Education Must Change.” There are
simply too many people in the design field who are unable to solve the
design problems or the research problem that they meet.
It should not be surprising that Daniel Kahneman uses statistics. He is
a professor of psychology with a BA from the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem and a PhD from Berkeley. I’d be surprised if he couldn’t
use statistics. His Nobel Prize comes from working in behavioral
economics to bring empirical research to the field of judgment and
decision-making while returning economics to the framework of behavioral
science. Training in research methods at the University of California is
robust – that’s one reason the university has graduated so many
Nobel laureates, and it’s a reason that so many work there. The
research is also rigorous, relevant, and creative. That is another
reason for the huge number of Nobel prizes among professors and among
those who studied at the University.
But you have raised an issue that deserve attention. It is not so much
the question of relevance and rigor – one aspect of what it is to b
robust. It is the issue of mastering a number of research approaches and
learning something about many more.
When people with a PhD go on to work in academic life, universities or
the university faculties within which they work are going to call on
them as research teachers and research training supervisors. In a field
where we have too few graduates to cover teaching needs and supervision
requirements, anyone with a PhD is likely to be assigned such work.
It’s nice to say that someone who lacks the requisite skills to
perform at an appropriate level won’t get these kinds of assignments
or jobs, but that is not the case. Most art and design schools lack a
solid research program. The hiring committees in these schools have no
real way to measure the research qualifications of potential staff. They
assume, therefore, that someone with a PhD from a university has the
appropriate training. This accounts for the many people who are doing
this work in our field who should not be.
You are right to say that “the best education is offered at any level
by hiring the best people with broad interests, different knowledge, and
different skill sets.” We have far too few of these in the design
field and far too few who can judge how to hire them.
Raising the quality of research training with an appropriate range of
common and well understood skills is one way to change this. I may be
mistaken, but I cannot see anything in the Rugg and Petre inventory that
should not be a common attribute of anyone with a PhD, regardless of the
field in which they work. When we get to specific methods and
discipline-focused training, then we move to a different and narrower
range of qualities. On the whole, though, I’d argue that robust
research training – relevant and rigorous training – requires the
skills and attributes they list.
Yours,
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
--
References
Friedman, Ken. 2010. “Heuristic Reflections on Assessing Creativity
in the Design Disciplines.” In Creativity, Design and Education.
Theories Positions and Challenges. Anthony Williams, Michael J. Ostwald
& Hedda Haugen Askland, eds. Sydney, Australia: ALTC Australian Learning
and Teaching Council, pp. 171-180. Free digital edition available at
URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/190744
Norman, Don. 2010. “Why Design Education Must Change.” Core77, 2010
November 26. At URL:
http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/why_design_education_must_change_17993.asp
Accessed 2012 June 19.
Rugg, Gordon, and Marian Petre. 2004. The Unwritten Rules of PhD
Research. Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press.
—snip—
[Ken] wrote: “This produces graduates who claim to ‘explore
understandings, and demonstrate new approaches’ without doing so.
“One reason for this situation involves programs that fail to
encourage rigorous inquiry precisely because they neglect robust
research training.”
Ken
I would not make such an explicit (“precisely because”) argument.
The relevance and rigor of their “research” training to their focus
of study should be the defining characteristic not “robustness” -
training in many methods of little interest or value to the candidate. A
PhD in Design History, for example, would need instruction in
appropriate research methods, including such things as how to make/argue
inferential comparisons between what took place at different times and
in different circumstances. Perhaps content analysis and even statistics
would be applicable (as Daniel Kahneman has shown), but the focal
evidence or interest may not call for such methods. A PhD degree should
signify the attainment of advanced knowledge and experience in
communicating it. A PhD should be hired to teach the knowledge they have
acquired when it, and they, are deemed of significant value to a school
or program. I believe that the best education is offered at any level by
hiring the best people with broad interests, different knowledge and
different skill sets.
—snip—
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