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Ken I owe you a note. I'll write soon. D - Quick note from Derek's iPod On Oct 16, 2011, at 15:36, Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Hi, Jane, > > You wrote, "I am really puzzled, I thought design research was dependent on design practice?" > > In many cases, design research does not depend on design practice. The relations between research and practice are subtle, and advanced practice in most professions depends on research. While practice informs many areas of research, research informs approaches to practice that are impossible before the research is done. > > In medicine, research is the foundation of advanced methods in surgery and clinical practice, while work in such areas as pharmacology, biology, chemistry, and genetics precede practical developments. Research rather than practice and research linked to clinical experimentation led to the advances in antiseptic procedure. Nevertheless, practicing physicians rejected the work of Semmelweis, Pasteur, and Lister for years. If we had depended on practice to drive research, we'd be stuck with 19th mortality rates, and it would be safer to do nothing than to seek medical help. > > In design, research often precedes improvements in design methods, new materials, computational analysis, user orientation, and other developments. Our field is also moving into basic research, a form of research that takes place long before practical applications are possible. Neuroaffective design is an example, involving areas of basic research that are not yet ready for translation into practice. It may be five to ten years before this work bears practical fruit. Most areas of neuroaffective design are related to psychology. Some streams of inquiry touch on behavioral economics, and others touch on human-computer interaction. This work grew out of Paul Hekkert's research at Technological University of Delft and Allan Whitfield's work at Swinburne Design rather than emerging from practice. > > If you're curious about the relations between research and practice in design, I'd suggest John Warfield's 1994 book, A Science of Generic Design: Managing Complexity Through Systems Design, and Herbert Simon's Sciences of the Artificial. If you'd like something short and accessible over the net, you might like to read my paper, Creating Design Knowledge. It is available at URL: > > http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/41897 > > Yours, > > Ken > > -- > > Jane McCormack wrote: > > "I am really puzzled, I thought design research was dependent on design practice?"