Dear Gunnar and Karel,

Karel makes the point, so I'll just add a me-too on this. I am 
certain that we would be able to find more examples with a careful 
literature search -- this is not the issue here. Gunnar asked if 
known cases exist. Karel showed that they do. This is the case for 
most fields of design practice.

The issue, as my post noted, is the challenge of bridging a 
difference between research culture and professional guild culture. 
And, as I noted, this is the same in many professions.

As for nay-saying, I'd propose that many of the things we prefer on 
an artisanal basis nevertheless fail to meet client needs or end-user 
needs. I much admire the work of a few graphic designers who develop 
projects based on careful user testing, or on ideas they've tested at 
one time or another. On occasion, I have heard other designers 
criticize them on artistic grounds -- good designers, mind you, who 
do beautiful work, but who refuse to acknowledge that solving a 
client problem or meeting an end user need may actually be more 
important than a startling or charming project. When I argue this 
out, they'll agree from time to time that much of the work is useful 
and serves the need, but they claim that even though this may be 95% 
true, the artistic 5% makes the difference, even when what they see 
as the artistic 5% competes with or makes the rest less usable. I'm 
not going to give examples because I don't want to get into issues of 
taste here. I don't want to accuse anyone of nay-saying. I want to 
say that the problem exists. Each of us must reflect on this in his 
or her own way.

Gunnar's post does call for two mild challenges. I did not present 
the case of the Challenger as an example of ground-breaking research. 
It was an explicit example of the kind of problem I raised in my 
post. This involved basic principles that everyone understood based 
on research done long ago. NASA overlooked clear risks and permitted 
a launch despite warnings, and then attempted to draw attention away 
from a simple problem. You do not need to be a Nobel laureate to 
recognize that, and Feynman did not get the prize for solving that 
problem. He acted as a citizen ought to do in drawing attention to an 
issue other members of the commission were willing to overlook. 
Following a careful examination of the problem, Feynman (2001: 
151-169) wrote a minority report that NASA tried to quash. You can 
read the story in James Gleick's (1992: 415-428) biography.

On the seventeen-year lag, there is a huge difference between 
seventeen months and seventeen years. The problems I discuss are 
problems that do not generally rely on shifting sands research, but 
on carefully constructed clinical trials and frequently on massive 
meta-analysis of multiple trials. In many cases, this involves 
evidence-based medicine (EBM).

To learn more about EBM, visit one of the good sites now available -- 
these are aimed at physicians and nurses, but lay readers can learn 
something useful

http://library.umassmed.edu/EBM/index.cfm

http://www.cebm.utoronto.ca/

http://www.evidence-based-medicine.co.uk/

The last site has some good download materials for those who want to know.

If Gunnar agrees with me on hand-washing, he ought to agree that EBM 
offers real advances based on massive clinical and statistical 
evidence. Much EBM material also provides levels of confidence based 
on an evaluation of the amount and kind of available evidence. Tjis 
is not seventeen-month stuff that careful conservative physicians 
ought properly to resist. It is hand-washing stuff, and the failure 
to adopt these practices leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths 
every year in the hospitals of advanced, wealthy nations.

If you want to learn more about what this means to real people whose 
lives are at stake, spend a couple of hours on the web site of the 
Institute for Health Improvement

http://www.ihi.org/ihi

Then ask yourself whether you'd rather go to a hospital that 
implements EBM and follows the kinds of protocols that IHI recommends 
-- or whether you'd rather trust your life to a physician who prefers 
waiting eighteen years to make sure that your treatment is 
conservative enough. This also applies to people who go to hospital 
for ordinary, easily treated health problems and die there because of 
hospital-generated illnesses totally unrelated to the initial health 
problem.

For those who don't want to read all the EBM literature or even as 
much as I've provided, Wikipedia has a pretty good overview piece. 
There is also a link to evidence-based design, a practice that David 
Durling has been advocating for several years. That's the kind of 
thing Karel does.

Warm wishes,

Ken

--

References

Feynman, Richard P. 2001. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. London: 
Penguin Books.

Gleick, James P. 1992. Genius. Richard Feynman and Modern Physics. 
London: Abacus.

-- 

Ken Friedman
Professor
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management
Oslo

Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School
Copenhagen

+47 46.41.06.76    Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95    Tlf Privat

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