Dear David,

Thanks for this note. I agree. 

I’d add that many scientists and university-based scholars agree with you as
well, and many practice research in relation to the principles you suggest.

All intelligent researchers in empirical fields leave room for the
unexpected. Research involves learning something about what the world has to
tell us, as well as learning something about how we respond to the world.
This requires us to consider and attend to the unexpected.

Famous scientists throughout history have developed important ideas in
unexpected ways. From Archimedes’s famous solution to the problem of
specific gravity developed while taking a bath to Kekule’s solution to the
problem of the benzene ring in a dream, observations from unexpected events
and unexpected sources have been crucial to research.

Louis Pasteur made this phenomenon into a scientific rule of thumb when he
stated that “chance favors the prepared mind.”

Scholars in the sociology of knowledge and the philosophy of science have
often examined the role of the unexpected in advancing science. As recently
as 2006, Princeton University Press published Robert K. Merton and Elinor
Barber’s long-awaited book on this theme, The Travels and Adventures of
Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science.

The point of controlled experiments is that controlled experiments often
allow us to determine which of two or more likely causes leads to a specific
result. This doesn’t mean that all scientific knowledge rests on controlled
experiments.

Today, however, the advance of high-powered computing and access to such
Internet tools as Google and web sites allows us to test different processes
swiftly though rapid multiple iterations. This is the point of Ian Ayres’s
recent book, Super Crunchers. Ayres, an econometrician and law professor at
Yale, posts a web site that allows you to test drive some of his prediction
tools at URL

http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayres/predictionTools.htm

Back when I did a lot of work in knowledge management and philosophy of
science, we used an heuristic that allowed us to examine the role of the
unexpected and the emergent by asking what we know we know, what we don’t
know we know, what we know we don’t know, and what we don’t know we don’t
know. It seems to me that many fields employ similar heuristics, formally,
informally, and often intuitively.

On this issue, I think you’ll find a great many scientists who agree with you.

I suspect that many also agree with you on the role of what you describe as
invisible research. Not everyone uses the label, but most researchers I know
and nearly everyone I’ve worked with respects the role of emergent
phenomena. In some cases, this is formalized through inductive research from
experience, as well as in many formal procedures used to capture different
kinds of professional experience, user experience, practical experience, and
other forms of learning from experience that may not be described in advance
through formal research questions.

As you note, this is a gray zone located at different points between
practice, investigation, and formal research. This is the kind of
conversation we also enter when we discuss experiential knowledge.

We agree on the importance of these issues. My note is simply an addendum to
say that more scientists agree with us than your note suggests may do so,
and there are a great many university-based scholars and scientists who
share our views.

Since research involves answering questions and solving problems, anything
that helps to advance the research process will interest a serious researcher. 

Gone are the days when a scientist tallied the number of a spider’s legs by
reading Aristotle. This, of course, is somewhat unfair to Aristotle. He was
a scientist and biologist who was right about many more things than the
number of legs on a spider, and he was a logician and philosopher who was
brilliant about even more. The comment is a critique of scientists and
researchers who don’t allow for the unexpected or remain deaf to what the
world tells us. 

You call for research traditions that allow for unexpected data and learning
from the world. So do I. Most researchers I know today share our views and
work this way.

Warm wishes,

Ken

Ken Friedman
Professor, Ph.D., Dr.Sci. (hc), FDRS

Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia


On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 11:49:30 +1000, David Sless
<[log in to unmask] wrote:

Hi all,
 
I’m pleased that the distinction between routine investigation and research
is useful, and that there is a recognition of the dangers of conflating
these two. I’d like to add two qualifications.
 
An interesting paradox:

One of our routine discoveries, during routine investigation, is that
something unexpected always happens. One of the questions we always ask
ourselves after a routine investigation, is ‘what struck you?’, ‘what did
you observe that you were not expecting to happen?’
 
Unlike the tightly controlled environment of scientific investigation, where
you can only test for something you expect to find, our work is in the much
less controllable, permeable, and non-predictable realm of human action. So
the unexpected always happens, and this can lead onto something that might
be described as research.
 
Invisible research:

There is a type of investigation that goes on at the interface between
designers and the public they serve which is not only in a constant state of
flux, but necessarily takes place in realm outside that of conventional
research.

I’m referring to the emergence of rules from practice. As a specific example
consider the various rules of layout and usage on the internet. Some of
these rules come out of the earlier rules for layout and usage of print, but
some rules are specific to the internet.
 
As a simple example, the rule about how to show a hyperlink, and then how to
use such a link, is still being developed. The investigation of such rules
takes place at the interface between designers and internet users the to and
fro of conversation. The rules emerge out of the conversation, and
eventually become formalised in style guides.

I think this is a kind of research by design, and it does lead to a kind of
shared knowledge. At the very least, designers play a critical role in this
collaborative research. They often create new rules and rule systems for
‘testing’ at the interface between design and people, and they get called
upon to articulate the rules, through style guides, so that others can apply
them.
 
I suspect that to many, particularly in the academy, this type of research
is invisible and unvalued. It should not be so.

David

blog: www.communication.org.au/dsblog
web: http://www.communication.org.au

Professor David Sless BA MSc FRSA
CEO • Communication Research Institute •
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