Dear Terry,
While I am a great admirer of Richard Feynman, this lesson is not quite applicable to the PhD curriculum. It is correct and illuminating in the context of Richard Feynman, a Nobel Laureate in physics with a lifelong habit of picking up other disciplines for fun. It is irrelevant in the context of PhD students.
To be able to do research, one requires a ready stock of actionable knowledge. This includes a great deal of information that is committed to memory. On his way to Nobel-level work in physics, Feynman had already mastered the full discipline of physics and much of its history. This is not a simple thing to do — Feynman had a remarkable memory and a massive stock of knowledge on which he drew readily to solve problems.
Richard Feynman used historical cases and multiple methods to solve problems. Part of this was a matter of fun. I suspect that some of this had to do with gaining different perspectives.
One example is Feynman’s use of geometry to solve a physics problem. You can see this in the book, Feynman’s Lost Lecture. The Motion of Planets Around the Sun. In this lecture, Feynman uses high school geometry to prove one of Newton’s laws in much the same manner that Newton himself might have used.
https://www.amazon.com/Feynmans-Lost-Lecture-David-Goodstein/dp/0393319954
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Feynmans-Lost-Lecture-Richard-Feynman/dp/0393039188
For Feynman, physics and mathematics of several kinds were a language. He used them fluently, and he would no more have needed to look up information in his own field than I would need to look up the meaning of most English-language words to speak. Just as I might need to look up the definition of a word or the etymology of a word for an article, Feynman was occasionally obliged to look up the literature of a topic with which he was working.
With respect to a field about which he knew nothing, Feynman often worked from first principles. That’s the core of this story.
If you’d like to get a sense of what it was that Feynman could do from memory without looking facts up to answer questions, you can look at him lecturing in live recording on the Feynman Lectures on Physics web site:
http://www.feynmanlectures.info
While the story you recount is interesting, it is irrelevant to research students. It is, in fact, irrelevant to biology students. Looking up old facts every time one started to work with a research question would not be relevant — or possible — for working biologists. They need to master and know the vocabulary and part of the history of their field in much the same way that Feynman mastered and knew physics.
One aspect of the PhD curriculum is helping students to understand what information and knowledge they require to do the kinds of research they must do. In addition, serious research often requires a certain amount of actionable knowledge and information that provides context — historical context, conceptual context, methodological context.
What makes this difficult in the design field is the nature of the questions our PhD students may be attempting to ask. Some students work with problems that may also be engineering problems. Others work with problems that are also psychology problems. Still others work with problems in industrial design, philosophy of science, or economics.
To many researchers in design — students and professors both — make simple research mistakes because they simply don’t know the basic concepts and methods of the fields in which they are attempting to work. On one hand, it is true that we can sometimes get new insight in a field by coming to an issue or problem with fresh eyes. Other the other hand, when we come to a field absolutely ignorant of what has gone before, we are far more likely to make simple mistakes.
Before Andrew Wiles solved Fermat’s Last Theorem, several thousand people attempted to solve it with demonstrably incorrect proofs. To solve the theorem, Andrew Wiles new on much of the historical knowledge of the field of mathematics.
In reviewing papers where designers attempt to solve problems in the social sciences, philosophy, or economics, I am often astonished at a mistake that appears within the first few paragraphs that make what follows impossible.
The challenge of research is to know what goes before while remaining open to new approaches and potential solutions. This is impossible if one must start completely fresh every time. One requires a vocabulary and a repertoire of appropriate information and knowledge, and the skill to apply them effectively to problems.
Yours,
Ken Friedman
p.s. A minor issue may be worth mentioning. Relatively few human beings have a mind on the order of Richard Feynman’s mind. Feynman had the capacity to wade into new scientific fields, mastering the information, concepts, method, and vocabulary rapidly. Most people cannot do this. For most people to work productively in most research fields, the discipline of the field itself provides a structured context for scaffolded learning. The responsibility of a PhD supervisor is to ensure that each student has scaffold that he or she requires. The PhD curriculum is part of that scaffold.
--
Terry Love wrote:
—snip—
A key part of this problem (and the resolution of the Design curriculum problem, which I suggest is also relatively easy) is hinted in the physicist Richard Feymann's description of his year as a molecular biologist in which he discovered introgenic suppression.
==
"The next paper selected for me was by Adrian and Bronk. They demonstrated that nerve impulses were sharp, single-pulse phenomena. They had done experiments with cats in which they had measured voltages on nerves.
I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I hadn't the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and asked her if she could find me a map of the cat.
"A map of the cat, sir?" she asked, horrified. "You mean a zoological chart!" From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate student who was looking for a "map of the cat."
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"
"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes."
== (from 'Surely You're Joking Mr Feymann')
The hidden implicit element on which Feynmann's life approach to research and knowledge worked is the ability to know and understand the structure of concepts, theories and knowledge in all disciplines - they are in fact the same across all disciplines.
Teaching that understanding, I suggest, resolves the Design (and Design PhD) curriculum problem as described by Mitch and David.
And that is easily done in the time of a degree ... It just needs a different language...
Hints of the same can be seen in the recent film 'Hidden Figures'
—snip—
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