Hi Ken, Gunner, Chuck, Klaus, Sarah, and all,

On 30/10/2008, at 8:26 AM, Charles Burnette wrote:
>  It remains as noted in 1976 (1) that "The design professions have  
> been able to get by in the past due to lack of hard research data  
> and a dependence on experience and intuition to fill in the gaps  
> where information was not available. This approach is no longer  
> tenable..."

Charles, this is depressing, and it is reflected to some degree in my  
own field of information design, though we do have some notable  
exceptions to that. Karen Schriver, one of our Fellows has an  
excellent bibliography in Her book Dynamics in Document Design. Also  
at CRI, over the years, we have put together a large research library,  
the catalogue for which will shortly be available on line. And there  
are some excellent, but now out of date, early examples of annotated  
bibliographies. But all of these are incomplete works in that they do  
not constitute an authoritative guide for practitioners and researchers.

I have discussed this with our CRI Fellows, and we are working towards  
some specific projects to deal with that. I have also talked to Ken  
about this and we may collaborate on some possibilities.

I agree with Gunner that Ken's choice of example on legibility was not  
a good one; there is a long history of research and debate on this  
subject which substantially agrees with Gunner. Having said that,  
there is an equally long  history and debate (including some of my own  
early work) that would disagree with Gunner's claim that:
> legibility and readability problems can best be uncovered by looking  
> and reading.

The evidence on that shows that designers are not necessarily in a  
position to uncover these problems just by 'looking and reading' (if  
by that Gunner means sitting in the studio doing the looking and  
reading oneself), though they are certainly the best people to uncover  
and solve these problems by using appropriate diagnostic testing  
techniques. See a recent paper by my colleague Alex Tyers at:
http://www.communication.org.au/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=86

Gunner also says:
>  I assume we agree that, as a general rule, designed objects should  
> and can be both aesthetic and practical.
I furiously agree with Gunner on that point. Indeed, I would go  
further and say that the aesthetic is essential for the practical.

The main issue, however, is in doing the work of setting criteria,  
collecting the evidence, and making it accessible. In that respect, I  
don't find some of our debate about the nature of evidence or facts  
useful (though as a part time philosopher they are interesting, and  
would be even more so if we didn't keep going over the same ground).   
More useful would be some actual attempts to do this work, on which we  
could all draw.

I have some work—as yet unpublished as a standalone publication—on  
criteria for selecting work for inclusion in information design  
projects*. I suspect that any phd student has to do the same type of  
thing when they do their review of the literature, but it would be  
nice to have some commonly shared starting points.

* pp 21-28 in:
Sless D 2001
Usable medicines information: generalised principles and processes for  
designing usable labels and leaflets for medicine: a review of  
research and practice 1994 to 2001
Retrieved from http://www.communication.org.au/http/usable_medicines_information.pdf

The issues involved in this work also have a bearing on our earlier  
discussion on this list on refereed journals. I recently had some  
correspondence with a research group working in my area who were  
proposing to do a literature review using only the peer reviewed  
literature.

Below is an edited version of what I wrote to them, somewhat sanitised  
to protect the guilty:

> The first thing I would say about this is that, if you confine  
> yourself to the 'published peer reviewed literature', you are going  
> to miss most of the important work relevant to your project. For a  
> variety of good reasons, most of the important work in this field  
> would never be submitted to peer reviewed publications. I could  
> spend a long time explaining why that is the case, but life is  
> short, and anyway, this is the sort of thing your team should know  
> about anyway. I would strongly suggest that, like other researchers  
> in this field, you broaden your search. The consequence of not doing  
> so is not only that you will miss some of the most important  
> contributions to the field, but your literature review will not be  
> taken seriously by the broad community of researchers and  
> practitioners in the field.


> The second thing I would suggest is that you should broaden your  
> search of the published peer reviewed literature. Most of the peer  
> reviewed published research literature that we brought to bear on  
> the original work we did for XXX, that led to YYY, was in areas  
> totally outside ZZZ, in the broader area of document design,  
> information design, communication, and usability testing. We had  
> been working in these broader fields for many years before we came  
> to ZZZ. Indeed, most of what we did in the XXX work and in the  
> subsequent PPP was already well established practice in other areas  
> of information design.


> As a researcher in information design I can tell you that there was  
> little novelty or originality in PPP, though it was firmly based on  
> earlier work. The main thing that was new was extending the  
> application of previous work to a new area of practice. To do a  
> proper literature review you need to think about XXX outside the  
> frame of ZZZ. XXX are an example of user instructions. There is a  
> lot of research on writing instructions for users in the areas of  
> computer human interaction, procedure writing, legal writing etc.  
> all of which is relevant creating effective XXX. But again, if you  
> confine yourself narrowly to the peer reviewed literature, you will  
> miss a great deal. …


> …Regarding the literature review process. In this area, as in  
> others, there is a need to develop  and apply rigorous criteria to  
> evaluating the work in the field. Its inclusion within a peer  
> reviewed journal is not an adequate criterion. I was disappointed  
> that you have not developed such criteria. No doubt this will come  
> at a later stage, I hope.



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