Dear David,
A few quick comments on your post.
This debate is not a matter of posturing. It’s a more subtle matter. This is a discussion list and people discuss issues. As they discuss issues, they adopt positions — and they adopt modes of self-presentation. You, too, are posturing.
Without claiming that this is your actual position, I’m going to make an outrageous declaration by suggesting that your “posture” can be read like this: [Enter stage left someone who has adopted the pose of a bourgeois 19th-century gentleman physician, drinking brandy and smoking a cigar.] “Harrumph! I grow impatient with those earnest academic grinds who toil away in the new universities. All this academic flummery with its attempt to define terms, to understand what it is they are talking about … We gentlemen physicians are the true practitioners of the medical art. We actually do know what we are doing, so why bother with all that? I’m off to the smoking room for another cigar and more brandy. [Exit, stage right.]
No I know very well that this is not your position, as I will explain below. You have made real contributions to the evidence-based practice of design. As a result, I am a bit put off by the posture. I interpret it as an attempt to reflect your jolly and somewhat avuncular nature, a genuine aspect of your personality. But it can be misread as a frame of mind suited to the 19th-century bourgeois professional, and that’s not you at all.
The transition of any field from traditional practice to evidence-based practice is a major passage. This is why I framed the issue of evidence-based practice in the context of evolving modern economies as Colin Clark and Daniel Bell describe them. This transformation particularly involves what Bell describes as a shift in methods and methodology. In pre-industrial economies, professionals rely on common sense, trial and error, and experience. The industrial revolution — and the scientific revolution — meant a shift to empiricism and experimentation. In Bell's post-industrial economies, new methods include models, simulations, decision theory, and systems thinking.
The greatest number of design practitioners today continue to rely on common sense, trial and error, and experience. While this involves some kinds of evidence, it is immediate sensory evidence based on personal aesthetic judgment. The approach is traditional, and the traditional framework often makes it difficult for practitioners to assess the evidentiary nature of the issues they consider.
You know this already. There are some debates and differences to be had, but you clearly advocate evidence-based design. Please do not let your impatience with the debate deflect you from an essentially sound position. You are letting posture of the brandy-drinking bon vivant deflect you from the important position that CRI has taken on these issues. You have published a major series of reports and books through CRI. People must pay to buy these documents, and I think they should. The question you must ask is whether people are more likely to purchase these excellent documents from a diligent researcher making a robust argument for evidence-based practice — or buy them from a cigar-smoking bon vivant who dismisses a serious discussion.
Of course you are impatient! Aren’t we all? It takes a long time to develop evidence-based practice. Compiling, developing, and interpreting serious evidence is difficult and time-consuming. It took decades of painstaking observation for Kepler to develop his laws of planetary motion so that later generations could build on his work. Once the work is done, though, progress speeds up. Progress in professional practice moves more slowly than science. Medical practitioners objected to Lister, Pasteur, and Semmelweiss. Their work on antiseptic hygiene is now a cornerstone of modern medical practice. Medical practitioners objected to Abraham Flexner — and to the work that led to evidence-based medical education.
But some of us are impatient for different reasons. Part of your impatience with the endless debate is the fact that people enter these debates for different reasons, and not all of the positions contribute to effective practice. Let me compare this with medicine. In one sense, evidence-based practice began early in the 19th century — but very few people accepted it or believed in it. Medical schools continued to function as traditionalist enclaves based on folk traditions, cultural assumptions, and intuition. Only in the wake of the Flexner report of 1910 — and the closure of more than 90% of the traditional medical schools — did medical schools move to the modern medical education we see today. Over the remaining years of the century, the slow shift came to evidence-based practice and evidence-based medical education as we understand them now. As I understand it, even the term "evidence-based practice" began in medical practice and medical education. It later became visible in such fields as nursing and engineering. While key concepts in evidence-based practice predate the explicit term by many years, transitions take time.
A serious discussion list is — for better and for worse — a talking shop. The point is that we each do what we believe best in our own research institutes, our own research projects, our own universities. This is where we come to reflect on the issues, to compare and contrast across a global environment, to share our ideas with an audience of 2,600 subscribers, and it is a place to hear from those who wish to share their ideas with the rest of us. It is still a talking shop. We don’t make decisions here, we don’t influence the professional field in any significant way, and we only influence the world of universities indirectly through the quality of our conversation and the resources we share.
If you don’t find value in academic debate among academics, this is the wrong place for a conversation. This is a discussion list oriented around a specific academic topic: the PhD in design. The open nature of this topic means that we discuss doctoral education in design along with a range of related issues and topics — research, research methods, comparative research methodology, philosophy of science, as well as design itself, design methods, and any other topic list members find relevant. The nature of evidence is one of these.
If these difficult and occasionally tiresome conversations bore you, then you are free to retire to the lounge for brandy and cigars. If you find it worth while to weigh in as the author of several important books and papers on evidence-based practice, you’ll be stuck with a conversation among academics.
My view is that you are most welcome. You have a great deal to bring to the conversation.
Warm wishes,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University Press | Launching in 2015
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia ||| Adjunct Professor | School of Creative Arts | James Cook University | Townsville, Australia ||| Visiting Professor | UTS Business School | University of Technology Sydney University | Sydney, Australia
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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