Dear Carlo,

A point in your note to Marianne caught my eye. It captures and clarifies an aspect of three recent threads that deserves consideration in its own right.

Your note, and notes from Kari Kuuti, Marianne Markowski, and Mattias Arvola – as well as by Tim Smithers, Eduardo-Corte-Real, and Francois Nsenga – all focus on different aspects of design that involve design practice in the research process.

You raise the question of terminology and meta-language. As an issue in its own right, this is related to but distinct from questions within the subjects to which terms and language refer. This deserves a thread specifically focused on the issues you raise:

“In this sense, can we assume ‘research through design’ as a research approach that explores design process potential in its methodological development?

“In relation to the terminology we are using, to be sincere I didn’t understand which is the substantial difference between ‘research through design’ and ‘constructive design research’. Could you help me? Maybe the expression research through design is not the best, and Koskinen et al. have the right to define their own meta-language.Anyway, I think that a research community as a whole, above all a so young community as the design one, has to be careful when changing its meta-language.”

What “research through design” or “constructive research” might be depends on the research questions and the objects of inquiry.

These include, among other possible issues, “a research approach that explores design process potential in its methodological development.”

There are other valid reasons for involving design process in a research program. These may be clearly useful in clinical and applied research, and possibly useful in basic research. While it seems that basic research might yield instance of cases of the kind that Kari describes in physics where experimentalists generate data that theorists interpret, I’m not quite sure what this might be in design.

Physics poses questions requiring very different kinds of experimental equipment than we do. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN cost over 7,000,000,000 Euros. Over 10,000 scientists and engineers worked on the project. The kinds of problems we must solve require far less investment and the teams we require to solve them are far smaller. Even in physics, however, many important problems saw physicists such as I. I. Rabi working with experiments and theory both. Great theorists such as Enrico Fermi and Richard Feynman understood and worked on the engineering and experimental side of the theoretical issues they developed and tested.

Without getting into the substance of these issues or the words that might apply to them, your post suggested three points.

1) We have not yet evolved a common language for these issues. There is a wide range of terms that somehow describe or entail forms of research in which practice plays arole. In some cases, the engagement primarily involves practice. In other cases, artifacts also play a part.

Without defining them, these terms include “research through design,” “research by design,” “practice-based research,” “practice-led research,” “design-led research,” “generative research,” and “constructive research.” The more standard terms “clinical research” and “applied research” sometimes appear in this context, as do such terms as “action research,” “transformative research,” and “situated research.”

The terms “studio research,” “artistic research,” and “practice as research” also appear in this context, but these terms generally refer to work that avoids articulating or theorizing what emerges from the design activity or practice. Instead, the position associated with these terms suggests that activity orpractice is itself a form of research and the resulting artifact is a research output. This is instantiated, for example, in the claim that a teapot, a toaster, or a piece of software might count as research. This also leads to the occasional claim that it should be possible to get a PhD for making a teapot, a toaster, or a piece of software, presenting the artifact together with a short essay incorrectly labeled as an exegesis.

2) Since we have not yet defined our terminology, we do not run the risk of changing our meta-language.

3) Describing the language, the terms, and the positions associated with them might be a useful topic for a serious and well-developed article.

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



-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list  <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------