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[The following is not exactly a reply to the posts following my
casual (and naive?) introduction of reflective practice. Rather,
it is my attempt at an elaboration that should have been in the
original post had I had the time and sense to write it then.

It is also quite long for an email. Over 1400 words. I tend to
see email as a lightweight medium, a mailing list as a verbal
discussion rather than a forum for written academic discourse.
But I am prepared to experiment with new work practices, even
though I fear that I contribute to the segmentation of the
phd-design list more than anything else.]

First, I would like to lay out a few personal beliefs that are
foundational to the rest of the text.

1. Design is to explore possible futures of the design situation
under consideration.

2. On a grand scale, scientific research is the efforts of a
certain community to produce knowledge pertaining to its field of
interest. If a member or would-be member of such a community
wishes to make a contribution, she needs to produce transferable
results.

[Remark 1. I realize that my choice of words in (1) is colored by
my own field of interaction design, where you always essentially
design a future use-of-IT (or non-use-of-IT!) situation rather
than an IT artifact. It might be that my characterization is
entirely unfamiliar to readers from more established fields of
design. In that case, please accept my apologies and read the
following, if you want to go on reading, merely as an anecdote
from a sibling discipline.

Remark 2. I am not too happy with the word 'transferable'. To me
as a non-native English speaker, it has a flavor of conduit,
transmission, information theory. In Swedish, I use the word
'vidareforbar' (courtesy of Goran Goldkuhl) which is more open to
the fact that any reception, assimilation is an active act of
interpretation and assessment. However, I will stick to
'transferable' for now because I don't know any better
alternative, and instead try to explain what it means to me.]

To explore possible futures of a design situation refers to the
parallel activities of creating expressions of possible futures
(including, but not limited to material artifacts) and reflecting
upon these expressions, assessing their qualities by analytical
as well as empirical means, clarifying the motives for key design
decisions. The two activities feed on each other: new ideas about
possible futures emerge from reflection, yielding new expressions
to assess, and so on.

It is conceivable that the results from such explorations can be
communicable. For instance, they can be communicable to other
designers concerned with similar situations.

I suggest the possibility of doing research by design along these
lines. This implies the possibility of a scientific community
where members make contributions that are well-grounded, possible
to criticize, possible to use as parts of the joint knowledge
construction going on in the community. As you might understand,
I think that interaction design can be or should be an example of
such a community.

So, what does all this have to do with Schoen and reflective
practice? There are two connections, I think. One is in the view
of design expressed in (1) above, where I use the word
'reflection' not in the sense of the famous reflection-in-action
concept but rather more like the cousin called
reflection-on-action. The insistence on action/reflection
parallelity also echoes the view of designing as a practice
rather than an analytical activity.

The other connection is in the belief that the main audience for
a piece of scientific research is other members of the scientific
community. I expect my fellow researchers to be designers, in the
sense that they work exploratively as suggested in (1).

And: an important idea discussed in Schoen and then further
elaborated by other design theoreticians is that design knowledge
relies heavily on a repertoire of formats. If my scientific
community aims at constructing design knowledge, a goal in
communicating my research becomes to support fellow researchers
in their development of repertoires.

Schoen is unfortunately not very clear on what a repertoire
consists of. His main ideas on how to develop design knowledge
(the reflective practicum, etc) seem strongly based on an
articulate master-apprentice relationship, quite craft-like but
more processually aware. This model is not easily adapted to a
scientific community. Other researchers have observed the use of
what seems to be repertoire elements in design, but there is no
definitive understanding that I am aware of.

We all know, of course, the importance of examples in design
education and discourse. I would propose that the granularity of
a repertoire (be it a personal one, or a collective one
continually constructed by a scientific community) is more
abstract than individual examples.

There has been a recent surge of interest in pattern languages to
encode and communicate slightly abstracted elements of design
knowledge, often motivated by arguments similar to the above. I
am not convinced that this is the way to go. Rather, I would
suggest a focus on the outcomes of reflection and assessment (as
part of research by design exploration). Qualities of a
particular expression of a possible future can be articulated and
communicated. Well-grounded communication of such qualities seems
to me to have great power in terms of extending the design
knowledge of the scientific community.

To mention a couple of interaction design examples, the work on
dynamic queries and starfield visualization by Christopher
Ahlberg and Ben Shneiderman at Maryland in the early 90s led them
to formulate the concept of 'tight coupling' which has a
significant impact on interactive visualization and arguably the
whole field of interaction design. Seely Brown and Duguid
discussed 'boundary resources' in human-technology relations
around 95 in a way that meant a lot to the emerging topic of calm
computing. [I don't have my library handy, please take the
bibliographic details with a grain of salt.]

What all this means, I think, is that a proper piece of
scientific research (in the community I think I belong to, or
would like to belong to) is argumentatively built from designs
and concepts. Or rather, representations of design acts in media
appropriate to the communication situation, plus words
introducing concepts stemming from 'reflection' on the design
acts.

Bluntly, research can consist of examples and a discussion of
them.

But not any examples and any discussion, of course. Apart from
the usual criteria of addressing relevant design situations and
making original contributions, there is a methodological
stringency part that I earlier refered to as transferability:

* The researcher must open herself to critique (following from
the community construction of knowledge view). Report data
interpretations and their grounds, report research process,
report interpretations of related work, report own bias, and so
on. All the standard requirements for qualitative empirical and
analytical research, which I find as elaborate as the
requirements for quantitative experimentation, if not as easy to
summarize.

* The progression of the work must tie the designs and concepts
together in the argumentative structure.

* The motivation for key design decisions must be constructed
(yes, I use this word intentionally) according the
criticizability criterion above. The design grounds for
conceptual development must be reported similarly.

Are there examples of this kind of research? To some extent.
There are many examples in, e.g., institutes of technology,
albeit most of them are not fully balanced. Most work in applied
computer science requires what is called implementations, which
refers to the practical work of expressing possible futures of
the design situation (to use my terminology). Such
implementations are routinely reported as part of papers and PhD
theses, sometimes even in replicable forms. I think it is fair to
say that they contribute to the collective repertoire of the
field. But the 'reflection' part, the development of concepts
with power beyond the individual examples, is less well developed
(with some counterexamples, of course).

I am not aware of any scientific community where the two strands
of 'action' and 'reflection' in the sense above are well-balanced
as a general rule. This may be an indication of possible gaps to
fill, or it could (quite likely) be a demonstration of my
ignorance. Can anyone educate me?

[I think this may be a good place to stop, for fear of moving too
far off on a tangent that is either uninteresting or plain common
sense to this readership. In my obsessed mind, there are many
topics that could be further addressed. Examples of scientific
communities working like this? Relations to the divide between
art practice and art criticism? Relative importance of
epistemologically different forms of 'reflection'/assessment?
Etc.

In either case, I find the notion of scientific research by the
reflective practice of design quite conceivable. Whether it is
adequate for attaining PhD degrees is a different question, that
finds its answer perhaps more in the politics of higher
education.]


Regards,
Jonas Lowgren