Dear Cigdem,
Your reply is a bit puzzling. Kari did not suggest “fixed” methods. He suggested that we need a methodological program to study and expand our repertoire of valid methods.
A method is how to do something. Methodology is the study of methods. To speak of a “valid methodology” confuses the two – as Bunge notes.
If we use the word “methodology” when we mean method, we then have no word for the explicit study of methods.
I’m going to disagree with you on a key point. You write, “There already is a lot of previous work where research was done through design. They do contain comparative studies of several methods. We are not starting from scratch.”
In my experience, there is not a great deal of previous _ valid _ work. I’ve seen far t0o many PhD thesis projects where the methodology section gets so much wrong that the research is simply not valid. The same holds true for a hundreds of conference papers and journal submissions I’ve seen over the years, and for a reasonable number of published articles.
This is one source of the problem Don Norman (2010) describes in his article, “Why Design Education Must Change”:
“As a reviewer of submissions to design journals and conferences, as a juror of design contests, and as a mentor and advisor to design students and faculty, I read outrageous claims made by designers who have little understanding of the complexity of the problems they are attempting to solve or of the standards of evidence required to make claims. Oftentimes the crap comes from brilliant and talented people, with good ideas and wonderful instantiations of physical products, concepts, or simulations. The crap is in the claims.”
Research methodology involves understanding what kinds of claims we may reasonably make. If our field had a proper foundation in methodology with a series methodological program, the situation would not be as bad as it is.
There are indeed some good thesis projects and many responsible articles – I’ve seen many. This is not a lot of work compared to other fields.
A little back-of-the-envelope work will show you why this is the case. There are perhaps 500 PhD thesis projects with a solid methodological foundation. Over the past two decades, our top peer-reviewed journals have published around 30,000 articles, give or take a few.
In some fields, there are tens of thousands of thesis projects, millions of methodologically valid peer-reviewed articles, and tens of millions of methodologically valid peer-reviewed conference papers. One archive alone has over 2,000,000 PhD dissertations and master’s theses across all fields, mostly in North America with some significant European representation.
The design field is quite young. We’ve only been awarding PhD degree for 10 to 20 years in most places, and – at least in my view – the quality of many PhD thesis projects was problematic in the early years. The people who earned a degree without a solid methodological foundation are now themselves problematic supervisors whose students replicate the problems and deficiencies of their teachers.
Compared to mature research fields with a rich history of systematic methodological inquiry, the design field has a long way to go. There are more good projects than there were twenty years ago, but have not yet managed to generate “a lot of previous work” compared to most fields. A significant amount of the problematic projects are projects in which research was done through design. The problem is not necessarily the design, but the research claims.
Kari’s call for a methodological program is one way to begin solving this problem. This is how mature research fields developed and continue to expand their repertoire of valid research methods.
Yours,
Ken
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] |Phone +61 3 9214 6102 | http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design
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Reference
Norman, Don. 2010. Why Design Education Must Change. Core77, 2010 November 26. http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/why_design_education_must_change_17993.asp (Accessed 2012 November 8)
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Cigdem Kaya wrote:
--snip--
I was pointing at two things:
1. Being "fixed" is not relevant but being "valid" is relevant for a methodology.
2. There already is a lot of previous work where research was done through design. They do contain comparative studies of several methods. We are not starting from scratch. And yes we always need more studies.
--snip--
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