Research Into, By, and For Design
[Long Post]
Friends,
Earlier in the thread on design as research, I mentioned that I would
return to consider Christopher Frayling’s three-part concept of research
into design, research by design, and research for design. It was
mentioned here, but there was little more than a brief passing comment.
This is a long post. Please feel free to delete if you are not
interested.
Frayling’s Research in Art and Design
Sir Christopher Frayling’s Research in Art and Design is perhaps the
most-cited and least read document in design research. In most fields,
I’d reserve that distinction for Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of
Scientific Revolutions or Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s Social
Construction of Reality. These also show up often in design research,
but there is a big difference. Each of these books now has millions of
copies in print, and both are widely read, quoted, and cited in addition
to the great load of citations by those who have never seen either
volume.
Christopher Frayling’s (1993) pamphlet, Research in Art and Design, is
different to the others in two chief respects. First, it is a small
proposal, and copies are hard to find. Second, nearly no one has read
it. As nearly as I can tell, over 95% of the citations, references, and
loose paraphrases to Frayling’s idea come from people who have not
themselves read Frayling. Since I am among the few who own a copy, and
one of the fewer still who seems to have read it, I am writing this post
to clarify some of the issues for those who don’t know what is involved
in the oft-cited idea of “research into design, research by design, and
research for design.” (Some of you will find this information familiar.
I have written on the subject elsewhere.)
The problems that come up in the pamphlet are serious, but they are not
new. I’ll start this thread by examing the larger context in which
Frayling’s concept occupies a niche.
Design Research as Grounded Theory
One of the deep problems in design research is the common failure to
engage in some form of grounded theory, developing theory out of
practice. Instead, designers often confuse practice with research.
Rather than developing theory from practice through articulation and
inductive inquiry, some designers simply argue that practice is research
and practice-based research is, in itself, a form of theory
construction.
Many of the problems in design research arise from category confusions.
In recent years, designers have become acquainted with the term “tacit
knowledge” articulated by Michael Polanyi (1966) in The Tacit Dimension.
Proposing tacit knowledge as the primary foundation of design research
reflects a surface acquaintance with the term by people who have not
read Polanyi’s work.
Tacit knowledge is an important knowledge category. All professional
practice – including the practice of research – rests on a rich stock of
tacit knowledge. This stock consists of behavioral patterns and embodied
practice embedded in personal action. Some aspects of tacit knowledge
also involve facts and information committed to long-term memory. This
includes ideas and information on which we draw without necessarily
realizing that we do so, and it includes ideas and information that we
can easily render explicit with a moment’s thought. It also includes
concepts, issues, ideas, and information that can only be rendered
explicit with deep reflection and serious work.
In social life and professional work, tacit knowledge is also reflected
in the larger body of distributed knowledge embedded in social memory
and collective work practice. Our stock of tacit knowledge enables us to
practice. Putting tacit knowledge to use in theory construction requires
rendering tacit knowledge explicit through the process of knowledge
conversion (Friedman 2001: 44; Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995: 59-73).
Tacit knowledge is necessary for human action. Without tacit knowledge,
embodied and habitualaction would require explicit conceptualization and planning each time.
The limits on immediate attention and cognition means that it would be
impossible to store and act on enough knowledge for effective individual
practice in any art or science, let alone accumulate the knowledge on
which a field depends (Friedman 2001: 42-44; Friedman and Olaisen 1999:
16-22). All fields of practice rest, in part, on tacit knowledge. (See,
f.ex., Bourdieu 1977, 1990; Chaiklin and Lave 1993; Friedman 2001:
42-44).
To say that tacit knowledge is not research and that design theory is
not identical with the tacit knowledge of design practice does not
diminish the importance of tacit knowledge. It merely states that
mistaken arguments about tacit knowledge as design knowledge demonstrate
the confusion of the scholars who make such statements. The confusion
rests on a simple failing: the failure to read and understand Polanyi.
The notion that tacit knowledge and design knowledge are identical as
sources of theory development is linked with the idea that practice is a
research method. Both rest on category confusions and both arguments are
generally supported by references to Polanyi and Schon – again by
authors who have not read the works they cite.
If there is any confusion on Polanyi’s views, there should not be. He
settles the matter at the beginning of another book, Personal Knowledge.
Where tacit knowledge is embodied and experiential knowledge, theory
requires more. “It seems to me,” he writes, “that we have sound reason
for . . . considering theoretical knowledge more objective than
immediate experience. A theory is something other than myself. It may be
set out on paper as a system, of rules, and it is the more truly a
theory the more completely it can be put down in such terms” (Polanyi
1974: 4).
Polanyi’s (1974: 3-9) discussion of the Copernican Revolution uses
different language to state some of the significant themes visible in
Varian (1997), Deming (1986, 1993), and McNeil (1993). These address
such concepts as descriptive richness, theory as a guide to discovery,
and modeling. As a guide to theory construction, this is also linked to
Herbert Blumer’s idea of sensitizing concepts (Blumer 1969, esp. ch. 1;
see also Baugh 1990, van den Hoonard 1997). All of these possibilities
require explicit knowledge, rendered articulate for shared communication
and reflection.
Rendering the tacit explicit is a crucial act of communication that
shapes research and the research cultures we build in any field. Only by
articulating what we know in some way do we enable others to take it in
and adapt or adopt it as their own knowledge. The complaint of novice
scholars in design research that we are “privileging the text” in a way
that somehow devalues design has it all wrong. Only through explicit
communication do we help others to access our knowledge so that they may
themselves transform what would otherwise be the raw data of artifact or
experience into information on which they may act to create knowledge.
(This involves a series of issues and distinctions I don’t propose to
elaborate here. I have discussed the nature of knowledge and the
distinctions among data, information, and knowledge elsewhere, f.ex., in
Friedman [1998] or Friedman and Olaisen [1999]).
One of the little noted points in many design research debates is the
fact that reflective practice itself rests on explicit knowledge rather
than on tacit knowledge. While Schon’s concept of reflective practice is
not a method of theorizing, (1991: 5-11), but it does raise many
questions on the kinds of thinking and reflection that contribute to
effective practice in many fields. Central to most of these is the
struggle of rendering tacit knowledge explicit in some way. While Schon
(1994: 9) suggests that there may be more possibilities for reflection
than words alone, he clearly distinguishes between the epistemology of
theoretical research and reflective inquiry.
Research Into, By, aMuch of this confusion is linked to the ambiguous definition of design
research proposed by Frayling in 1993. Frayling (1993) suggested that
there are three models of design research, research into design,
research by design, and research for design. Frayling is unclear about
what “research by design” actually means and he seems never to have
defined the term in an operational way. In a 1997 discussion (UK Council
1997: 21), he notes that it is “distantly derived from Herbert Read’s
famous teaching through art and teaching to art.” This leads to serious
conceptual problems.
Read’s (1944, 1974) distinctions deal with education and with pedagogy,
not with research. The failure to distinguish between pedagogy and
research is a significant weak area in the argument for the concept of
research by design. In addition to the difficulties this has caused in
debates on the notion of the practice-based Ph.D., it also creates
confusion for those who have come to believe that practice is research.
The confusion rests, again, on a failure to read.
Frayling’s proposal seems to be have been an effort to establish
possible new research categories. As an inquiry or probe, this is a
worthy effort. The problem arises among those who mistake an
intellectual probe with a statement of fact. To suggest that such a
category is possible does not mean that it exists in reality. Dragons
may exist, but we have no evidence that they do. Medieval mapmakers
created great confusion and limited the growth of knowledge for many
years by filling in the empty edges of their maps with such phrases as
“here there be dragons” rather than admitting, “we know nothing about
what lies beyond this point.”
Beyond this arises the problem of what “research by design” might mean.
If such a category did exist – and it may not – the fact of an existing
category would tell us nothing of its contents. Unlike dragons, we know
that the planet Jupiter exists. Like the edges of the map, however, we
know relatively little about conditions on the surface of the planet.
Even though the laws of nature mean that some facts must be known –
gravity and pressure, for example – these facts tell us little about the
myriad realities that may play out depending on specific factors.
As a probe, Frayling’s discussion was intended to open possibilities.
Those who mistake it for a report mistake its potential value.
In one important sense, however, Frayling seriously misunderstood Read.
He used the surface structure of Read’s terms without acknowledging a
crucial explicit distinction in Read’s approach. Read was not describing
practice-based research. He was describing practice-based education.
Education takes place through direct practice. This is true in art and
in design. This is the case in socialization and modeling, in guild
training, and it is the basis of apprenticeship (Friedman 1997: 55,
61-65; Byrne, and Sands 2002). In many situations, education and
learning proceed by practicing an art or craft. One can also learn the
art and craft of research by practicing research. Nevertheless, one does
not undertake research simply by practicing the art or craft to which
the research field is linked.
While the phrase “research by design” has been widely used by many
people, it has not been defined. I suspect, in fact, that those who use
the phrase have not bothered to read either Frayling’s (1993) paper or
Read’s (1944, 1974) book. Instead, they adopt a misunderstood term for
its sound bite quality, linking it to an ill-defined series of notions
that equate tacit knowledge with design knowledge, proposing tacit
knowledge and design practice as a new form of theorizing.
While these problems are relatively inconsequential outside our field,
it is important to understand them if we are to develop a foundation for
robust design research. This is why I have given them so much thought.
Again, I want to be clear on the many values of tacit knowledge. Tacit
knowledge is central to all human activity. Embodied individual and
social knowledge provides offers the existential foundation of all
activities, including intellectual inquiry. The only issue I raise here
is that tacit knowledge and reflective practice are not the basis of
research and theorizing. This is not to say, however, that there are no
relations between those different categories of construct.
Experience and Inquiry
When ancient science was merely hypothetical and deductive, it offered
no way to select among theories. While the river civilizations of
Mesopotamia, Sumeria, Egypt, and China made great advances in practical
knowledge, administrative routine, and professional practice in many
fields, they had nothing in the way of scientific theory. Explanations
were traditional and practical or mythic (Lloyd 1970: 1-23; Cromer 1993:
throughout).
Thales proposed the first scientific theory when he suggested that the
earth was once an ocean. While he could not test his theory, what made
it scientific as contrasted with mythic was the fact that Thales
proposed a natural explanation rather than a story of divine action.
Greek mathematics offered another foundation for science, and the
Pythagoreans and Euclid built theories that are still used today. Again,
however, there were no tests. Mathematical and geometrical theories are
entirely axiomatic, and they can be tested by deduction and logic. While
empirical inquiry found a few early champions in such medieval scholars
as Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, it was not until Francis Bacon
(1999, 2000) published The New Organon in 1620 that a philosophy of
science was articulated requiring a foundation in empirical observation.
At the same time, observation linked with inventive theorizing accounted
for the great advances of Copernicus, Galileo, Newtown and many more.
The tradition of empirical inquiry lies beneath two great activities in
design: design science and reflective practice. These meet in research
traditions of many kinds, including those traditions anchored in social
science and critical inquiry.
Because I don’t propose to go on to describe a philosophy of science, I
will not explain how or why this is so, and I will not develop an
argument for any specific research tradition or the kinds of theory
construction on which a tradition might be established. I merely point
to the fact that explicit and articulate statements are the basis of all
theoretical activities, all theorizing, and all theory construction.
This true of interpretive and hermeneutical traditions, psychological,
historical, and sociological traditions, and it is as true of these as
of quantitative research in chemistry, descriptive biology or research
engineering, logistics, and axiomatic mathematics. The languages are
different. Nevertheless, in each case, only explicit articulation
permits us to contrast theories and to share them. Only explicit
articulation allows us to test, consider or reflect on the theories we
develop. For this reason, the misguided effort to link the reflective
practice of design to design knowledge, and the misguided effort to
propose tacit knowledge or direct making as a research method must
inevitably lead to dead ends.
Concluding Notes
This is a side-track to the conversation as a whole. I wanted to post it
rather than let yet another casual reference to Frayling’s proposal
drift by unnoticed.
This is not a critique of an idea that might have had promise fifteen
years ago when Prof. Frayling first suggested it. It is a critique of
those who never bothered to read Frayling, who never read the earlier
work by Sir Herbert Read on which Frayling based his proposal, and never
bothered to think these issues through in a process of critical inquiry.
It’s time to put “research into design, research by design, and research
for design” out to pasture.
Ken
Ken Friedman
Professor, Ph.D., Dr.Sci. (hc), FDRS
Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
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