Dear GK: 

You wrote,

—snip—

Since 2005 we have tried to get the design education community to better grasp the significance of the shift underway (see SenseMaking is Rising below) but many program leaders have been slow to adapt which has impacted the volume of folks with skills in this direction right now. This slow adaptation has caused a significant shortage of talent for those practices already operating in this arena. This could have been avoided. Few design schools have been in sync with this shift already underway for an extended period. This too could be learned by any open minded graduate student doing research in this direction.

Many high flying design schools still have no sense-making oriented programs and even fewer are informed by leading practice knowledge from this direction. That's a long-standing missed opportunity.

Instead of posturing that this is an invention occurring here on this list lets instead practice what we preach and acknowledge that this is a subject that already exists in many forms outside this list. It's a subject that has a long history that informs what it is and isn’t today. That's the fair and honest thing to be modeling to young readers.

—snip—

No one suggested that the concept of evidence-based practice began on this list. Even so, some of us have discussed evidence-based practice since the early 1990s.

One characteristic distinguishes fields that make the shift to evidence-based practice. This is the development of robust research to support advanced professional practice. The development of evidence-based practice in fields such as medicine, nursing, or engineering has been accompanied by the development of scholarly and scientific disciplines. 

Ultimately, fields determine the nature of evidence-based practice when researchers in different places investigate, challenge, or corroborate published claims. Evidence-based practice requires peer-reviewed publishing in respected journals. Peer-reviewed publishing requires us to explicitly state our research questions, show our methods, and demonstrate our results. Medical practitioners, for example, read The New England Journal of Medicine, BMJ, PLOS, and The Lancet to learn about the current evidence that matters for medicine. 

Evidence-based practice requires evidence. Every research field uses peer review to determine the credibility and reliability of evidence. That is why modern medicine finally came to rest on Lister, Pasteur, and Semmelweiss and not on those who opposed them. This is why evidence-based medical education begins with Flexner. This takes time and patient work. 

Research requires establishing a reasonable basis for responsible claims. This takes time. We don’t publish our research on the PhD-Design list. We sometimes discuss it here, but the list is a discussion group. We publish research in peer-reviewed journals.

Practitioners tend to be impatient. One of the recurring themes in your posts to the list is that we move too slowly to suit you. I accept your criticism. It is a necessary factor in the work of anyone engaged in serious research. I hope it does not seem rude in this case to note that none of the articles you posted is peer-reviewed. You offered a TED talk, a newspaper article, and a long list of your own Humantific publications. You have been arguing for a certain kind of change in university-based design education. 

You are impatient because design educators have not adopted your ideas. One reason for this is that there are two major groups of educators responsible for university design schools. One group is comprised or relatively traditional educators who are happy with the models they developed in the years following the Second World War. The other group involves people with a solid foundation in research. The first group may be happy with things as they are, so your message doesn’t appeal to them. The second group requires evidence to demonstrate that your ideas offer a reasonable way forward.

Some members of the research community have been interested in your ideas and publications. Even so, citation patterns demonstrate that you have convinced few researchers that your ideas are valid enough to use in their own work.  In my view, one reason for this is the fact that you have never been willing to submit anything to a peer-review process. You are not a researcher asking other researchers to practice what we preach. You are a practitioner preaching to researchers.

You become a researcher when you join the community of researchers as a peer. To do so, you must publish your work on the same basis as the rest of us: you must explicitly state your research questions, show your methods, and demonstrate your results. You submit these to a peer-reviewed journal that asks other researchers review your work, deciding whether to publish your work in a research journal. When it comes to research, that is the key foundation for practicing what we preach.

So far you have not published anything in a peer-reviewed journal. You must publish in peer-reviewed journals to influence the research field as a peer. That is how to influence the researchers who manage university-based design schools.

Several excellent journals would be suitable for articles on the sense-making agenda — Visible Language, Design and Culture, CoDesign, the International Journal of Design, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management come to mind right away. Others might be receptive to an article that focuses on specific aspects of the sense-making agenda — Design Studies, the Design Journal, and others would work, depending on the issues you approach.  

In the context of this conversation, it would be useful to demonstrate that the sense-making agenda is a form of evidence-based design practice. This requires showing how specific sense-making practices function. If you show your methods and demonstrate your results, it will go a long way toward influencing the field. Right now, there is no way to decide whether the sense-making agenda is 1) a form of evidence-based practice, or 2) an intuitive, visually appealing way to recast ideas and information. Both have a useful role, but they differ with respect to validity and reliability. You are calling for changes in design research and design education, but you have yet to show that you offer something more valid and reliable than what we have now. 

Valid, reliable change is slow. That is why the shift to evidence-based practice takes so long. The reason that research requires patience is that our job is to find out whether things are what they seem to be, testing claims carefully to see what really works.  
 
Yours,

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

Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn 


-----------------------------------------------------------------
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
-----------------------------------------------------------------