Dear Martin Ken David and all
I agree with you Martin and I was also wondering about Kens reading of David.
To quote David: …..this early indication from the main panel makes the sector seem quite healthy, and the practice-based commentary stands in stark contrast to those who still cannot comprehend the value of investigative design practice.
This does not mean that there is no room for improvement on practice research in design. But the way you put it Ken, if I don’t misunderstand you, I am afraid you will have to wait forever, because the thing you are waiting for, practice research that produces clear singular answers to clear research questions will never happen. It will never happen in any practice research other than in very particular cases. I will try to show why.
Generally my position is that we should measure what we can measure and count what we can count as well as create hard experiments use statistics etc whenever possible. The problem is that this is not and will never be enough and it will only give us fragments of what are looking for. And it does not work in generative knowledge production.
To move this discussion forward we need to become more specific and we need to remove some errors.
It is a problem with many of the discussions on this list that notions of research, evidence etc are used in an imprecise way. I am honestly confused when people on this list talk of evidence based design, what do they think constitutes evidence? A question discussed here before and without conclusion. Or the notion of RESEARCH: Are we talking of research in a strict manner or as a looser mode of knowledge production? It would be very productive if we would start with (not agreeing on definitions but) just telling what we personally mean with terms like evidence, research, etc.
Science is not unified (no, it isn’t), but it has many variations and modes of inquiries. I think of it as approaches, methods and issues along a scale from hard science (natural sciences) to soft sciences (cultural studies, ethnography etc). Design is a bit scattered all over the place, some issues we could address with hard methodologies other issues clearly need ethnographic approaches while some are almost beyond the soft end of science and we need to design particular modes of knowledge production for design. Soft does not automatically mean less substantial. It only means that soft sciences and methods deal with issues that are more difficult than the hard ones in the sense that it is less orderly, more complex, more diffuse, it’s about dynamics and moving targets, it’s about complex wholes etc. Falsification or verification beyond any doubt is impossible in these cases and we need to rely on multiple sources, experiences, interpretations and triangulations as well as scientific reasoning and judgment to render our arguments valid. The argument is essential in all science but especially in the soft ones. This poses special challenges to the soft wing of scientific inquiries when it comes to research design, argumentation, criticality and how things are combined and supported (triangulation).
Design is a complex, interdisciplinary, culturally diverse and dynamic theme that will lose its particularity when chopped into fractions, and therefore the center of design research needs (to a certain degree and more or less) to be of that soft, inclusive and holistic type. Reducing it to hard science only will render design research irrelevant because it will miss out on the central aspects and nature of design. (Honestly I don’t think the “hard wing” on the list imagines this but I am uncertain because as said I am not sure what is their interpretation of the terminology) This does not mean that hard data, experiments and hypothetical deductive research designs are banned. In contrary these modes are useful but one needs to see the context. Also statistics are useful. But common for all the hard approaches is that they merely can play a supporting role. They can figure as elements in a bigger hybrid or conglomerate research design. The central aspects tend to depend on softer approaches not unlike those in the soft sciences.
But relaying on the import of methods and approaches from other fields is not enough. In any field of scientific inquiry, good research design is central. Research design is important in design research and (we can agree) it is under-developed. There are attempts of new ways of prototyping, action research, the use of “probes” and what is called evidencing in interaction design. (I don’t like the term)
This brings me back to the term evidence: What do we mean with the term evidence? Strictly speaking it is tied to hard research design, the hypothetical deductive experiment that brings answers beyond doubt. If we use this connotation of the notion of evidence it is clear that it has only a very marginal role in design research at large and in practice research in design particular.
We also have statistical evidence were I am at loss (meaning ignorant) and I don’t know how this relates to hypothesis.
There might be other modes and established uses of evidence and the picture is not clear but I would argue for hybrid research designs, interpretation, reasoning and argumentation, triangulations, argumentation that renders a claim valid. (note: Valid, not verified or falsified)
Further on I suggest that we need to look at the issues of the unique and generalization: The notion of evidence and the hard sciences are tied to the notion of repeatability. The notion of repeatability is (again strictly speaking) based on de-contextualization, fragmentation and isolation into scientific experiments. Unfortunately design and all other fields that deal with truly important matters regarding human culture and existence tend to deal with complex matters that are not possible to isolate into lab experiments without changing their deepest nature. Since we live in dynamic systems the system we live in is not the same today as it was yesterday. (Strictly speaking repetition is not possible). Especially in design research, where design is about generative processes, the very idea of exact repeatability is severely challenged. To a certain degree we investigate the UNIQUE. But there are patterns of repetitions. This makes generalization difficult. But this is only a difficulty if we think of generalization as (again) from the perspective of the hard sciences. In soft sciences like ethnography this seems not to be a big problem because there one realizes that generalization involves interpretation and an ongoing discourse. In practice research in design this process of interpretation and discourse should be developed better.
One returning error is the belief that research needs a research question. It is true that we in almost all cases of inquiry can state a question or at least retrofit it. In many explorative inquiries it might be a simple open question like “what is there” when crossing the inland ice of Greenland the first time. But this is not a research question in the scientific sense. A research question strictly speaking is a singular question that can be definitely answered by verification or falsification. So research questions actually only address the very particular and mostly principally simple issues.
But this simplistic conception of the research question for obvious reasons is very limited when it comes to explorative inquiries into unknowns and into very complex interrelated matters as well as into human activity systems. The simplicity of the research question assumes a fragmentation and isolation of reality into isolated lab conditions to reduce complexity. In our resent discussions in design research we rarely speak of problems, but rather of problematiques, or problem fields, or networks of interrelated problems (or rather issues than problems). In these cases the research question in its original form is useless. In some cases the term is still used but actually not in its strict interpretation but in a much looser form. It is doubtful that it is justified to still call the loose application of questions and often a set of many questions to a design research project for research questions. If anybody uses the term research question differently than its original use, I think it is their responsibility to tell us and describe and argue for this use.
It is also a bit amusing to observe e.g. doctoral thesis in progression where “research questions” are rewritten and only emerge in their final form at the end. This is a practice I have observed quite often. This indicates an inductive process camouflaged as a deductive process rather than a truly deductive process where one states a question and answers it through the research.
Also in main stream science it is absolutely not so that you always need a research question. It is just not correct to claim this. I have only to falsify this claim by pointing to one example where the use of research questions is banned in scientific research methodology. And here it comes once again: in Grounded Theory the use of any pre-formulated assumption (hypothesis and or research question) is banned. The reason for this is to build theory bottom up without any top down preconceptions that would bias the theory construction. So hereby once and for all, the claim that you always need a research question should be falsified. GT and other inductive research modes (e.g. action research) are for obvious reasons especially useful, inspiring and interesting for design research. So especially in design research the idea of the research question I suggest is often insignificant. Instead you might have thematic fields, directions, interests and at best general questions like what will I find if… But these do not qualify as research questions.
As far as I understand the origins, a research question is based on a hypothesis and hypothesis is the foundation for deductive research. Inductive research is not based on hypothesis or any other presumptions; it is bottom up and reaches at conclusions rather than tests existing assumptions. So the same goes for the use of the notion of hypothesis on this list. Strictly speaking a hypothesis is something particular in science formulated so that it can be tested definitely.
A pragmatic difficulty with the notion of the hypothesis and research question is the problem that if you are able to formulate a specific hypothesis then you already know the possible answers. It will be very biasing for the inquiry and it fits very badly with the notion of generative knowledge production.
About the issue of research through (or by) design: Maybe we should call it inquiry or knowledge production rather than research, or at least keep in mind that we in this case use the term research in a very inclusive sense. Harold Nelson makes a clear distinction here between research and inquiry. It is clear that Research through or by design is not a notion of research that is in any way comparable to the notion of research in the hard end of science. It is also not an inquiry in the common sense. An inquiry, I suggest, is to look into something existing: to investigate WHAT IS. But is research through design a form of knowledge production? The answer to this is to my mind certainly YES. It is not the knowledge of what is there but WHAT COULD BE. (As stated by Nelson and Stolterman and others) Several of the financed research projects at our institute are based on research through design approaches, and the research council of Norway has no problems with that. You might discuss if these are research or development projects (they have components of both) but they are definitely generative knowledge production projects.
Here are some few examples of research through design I could think of from our environment:
Formakademisk.org whole volume 3 no 1
http://www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/IJDesign/article/viewFile/1408/618
http://www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/IJDesign/article/viewFile/1245/599
There are quite many more examples on ijdesign.
Maybe it is time for a meta study?
(jeeez i dont have the time for this....)
Birger Sevaldson (PhD)
Professor at Institute of Design
Oslo School of Architecture and Design
Norway
Phone (0047) 9118 9544
www.birger-sevaldson.no
www.systemsorienteddesign.net
www.ocean-designresearch.net
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