Hi Gunnar,

My apologies and my thanks to you for the 'heads-up' on the quotation marks.
No sense of being dismissive intended on my part. My  use of quotes around
'published' was because I was using the term to also apply to graffiti and
toilet wall scratching that are sort of 'published' but not *published* in
an academic sense.

On government policy, the issue probably is more about socio-economic
benefits relating to each countries ongoing evolution and innovation rather
than direct lifesaving activity.  In that evolution and innovation,
humanities, social sciences, arts and design play significant parts. Hence
it would be expected to assess the different aspects of their research
contributions, to inform policy-making. The OECD manual provides the agreed
international guide on how to do that.

When you wrote,
' You often seem to want to define design as "stuff that's like mechanical
engineering." You now seem to want to apply that definition to all
intellectual activity. '

I'm not sure how you read that into what I wrote about the Frascati Manual.
The Frascati Manual is the defacto standard that forms the basis for
collecting information ABOUT  research outputs and activities in the US and
the rest of the OECD countries.  I'm simply pointing out that in that manual
and the work that went into it over the last 50 years there already exists
practical high-level, well-developed and agreed international definitions of
research that apply really well to design research along with all other
disciplines and are already the basis of what is used as a reference for
collecting data about research  by all our institutions and governments for
over 50 years. 

This seems to me to be relevant when we are in the short term inventing new
definitions of research, as we are when we discuss using 'clinical research'
as a definition of design research.  As I've written, from artistic,
aesthetic, practical, humanistic, cultural and creative perspectives and
more, the idea of 'research through design practice' seems to align much
better to the concept of 'experimental development' (remember the Arts Labs,
Melkweg and similar?) in the Frascati Manual than the much more restrictive
'clinical practice'. 

You also wrote you were not sure  what I meant by  'Such a definition of
research must get much closer to  an absolute definition of research than
that of the individual disciplines because it must  address the same issues
as the individual disciplines and much more.'

My apologies if I was not clear. The issue is epistemological. The aims of
any definition are that it is useful; is 'necessary and sufficient' in
nature;  generically defines the boundaries of a set with particular
properties (i.e. it includes what it is supposed to and excludes everything
else); and it applies as widely as possible across disciplines and
situations. To a large extent the quality and value of a definition depends
on this breadth of its applicability. An aim of all definitions is that it
applies in all relevant contexts, i.e it is as generic and absolute as
possible.

To make this concrete, the value of the definition of the term 'art' would
be less if it was defined in such a way that it applied to Australian art
activity and outputs  but absolutely didn't apply to similar activities in
the US and elsewhere in the world, or that it incidentally included
activities that many would not regard as art. The best kind of definition is
more accurate, generic and absolute.

Considering broader contexts when creating a definition can improve it
because there is a greater wealth of information and knowledge  from which
to draw. In addition, increasing the breadth of contexts for which a
definition is crafted presents greater challenges for the definition writers
that if overcome provides definitions with increased value and quality.

Because the definitions of research developed for the  OECD guidelines (for
collecting information about research output levels across disciplines)
must work well across so many disciplines, they have the above benefits of
breadth of context in their development, compared to more limited
definitions of research developed within the worldview of a single
discipline.

Using such a broader context with more information and more knowledge from
all disciplines, offers the basis for identifying definitions of research
that are closer to being absolute and generic. This is  unless the
disciplines are incommensurable. That is a different argument, and would be
hard  to claim for design research because of its high level of integration
with so many other fields

I hope this clarifies what I intended.

Warm regards,
Terry 


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