Hello!
Various people asked me to stay around, so I crept back on to
PhD-Design some days ago, and have been hiding. My idea was
to hang out in the gallery and just watch.
It's been interesting, as it mostly is here, but now I just
can't keep my mouth shut. OK, keep my fingers still.
In his most recent post, a reply to Luke, in a long running
discussion covering quite a lot of points, Birger Sevaldson
arrives at saying ...
"Research by Design is a systematized inquiry through and
by design to create new space for design action."
Of course, Birger, if you want to call this research, you can,
but I would call this designing. And I would call research
something else.
Research, to me, and I believe to most other researchers here,
is the collective and collaborative construction of reliable
new knowledge and understanding. And, by research I don't
mean just scientific research, I mean research in any domain
or discipline.
Importantly, research is necessarily a collective and
collaborative business. Good research cannot be done just by
one person working all on his or her own. The reliability of
any new knowledge and understanding stands on how widely it is
accepted and recognised by the community of other researchers
and practitioners--users of that knowledge and understanding.
Without this community recognition and acceptance, there can
be no proper claim of reliability. And without established
reliability, we have no real new knowledge and understanding.
And, of course, this reliability can be, and sometimes is,
mistaken: what we [nearly] all thought we knew and understood
can turn out to be wrong in some way. But knowing and
understanding how and why this is, is always the result of
further research.
The outcomes of any designing, on the other hand, do not
necessarily have to receive any community wide acceptance and
recognition for it to be perfectly good designing. Designing
is not necessarily a collective and collaborative activity,
though it can be.
Designing can, and does, lead to new knowledge and
understanding, but, this is not new knowledge and
understanding of a research kind. It is new knowledge and
understanding of a personal kind, or group kind. By which I
don't mean it has no value. It does, or, at least, it should
have.
And, with further work--what I would call research
work--design outcomes can become research outcomes. But this
does not, and cannot come about just by doing designing, no
matter how good the designing.
So, I would agree that designing can be a way of doing
research, but only if those doing the designing are
researchers too. Designers may do good designing, but they do
not do research. At least not what I take research to be.
And whilst designers can and do redefine many aspects of our
lives, and often for the good, it is not a good idea for
designers to try to re-define what doing research is by saying
they do research by design. That just results in confusion.
Designing and researching are two quite different kinds of
human endeavour. They can be combined, and usefully so, but
doing so requires knowing how to do good designing and how to
do good researching, in my view.
Best regards,
Tim
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