Terry Love wrote:
>How you describe 'research through design' seems to be identical to what
>elsewhere is called 'Research and Development' (R&D)?
Good point, Terry. Industrial R&D has indeed a similar flavor, and in some research communities, like in HCI, people from industry have been and are important contributors, and sometimes even leading the way. The mindset is of course different and the loop between R and D is very tight: in "real" R&D everything is looked through eyeglasses such as: is this something that can be used in the further development? or: can this be patented to block the development by our competitors? and what does not fit to these categories is just discarded. I would hope that our research would be more open-minded... And in R&D it is typically D that is leading, and dictating the direction and pace; in our research it should be other way round... anyway, it may be indeed worth of taking a look where R&D discussion is going. And thanks for the references, the Japanese book in particular seems interesting.
Let me clarify the previous message a bit:
As rhetorically engaging the phrase 'research through design' may be, it is misleading by conflating the two issues. There is the intellectual and practical design work to create a novel artifact, and there is the intellectual and practical research work to utilize the creation and use process of that artifact to extract and conceptualize data, to interpret and analyze it and to communicate the results. For the sake of clarity it is useful to keep these two threads separate. When they are separated, it becomes possible to ask questions such as:
How are these two threads related to each other in practice?
What are the unique research questions, the answer of which has to be based on the development of a new artifact? (Otherwise, why bother?)
What are the points in the design/construction/use process, where valuable data to answer these questions can be extracted?
What are the methods that can be used in extraction?
How is the data to be conceptualized (what do we look for?)
How it is interpreted and analyzed?
How it is to be communicated?
I would call the resulting discussion a methodological one. Practically everybody who has developed and used artifacts for research purposes (which is probably most of us) has been struggling at least with some of the questions, and finding at least partial answers. The point is to collect, organize and systematize what we already know, identify the worst gaps in the knowledge and push the effort forward to fill them – definitely a community effort.
best regards,
--Kari Kuutti
Univ Oulu, Finland
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