Hi Chris, Ken and all the others,
I can the question of the style of research communication is an open question. If I could add a problematic area I found quite relevant I would mention my problems with dealing with research using ethnographic material, especially when such material needs to be used for a design process (e.g. in action research or participatory research). Ethnographic material usually has very expressive content, but it is hard to "handle" in any process that implies design, it needs interpretation and simplification.
I've seen several research works using video as an appendix or as a complementary part to the "narrative" section, and I think the complementarity between written and video material is becoming more and more relevant. Right now we are writing the final report for a research project and we will probably insert several links to videos on youtube. 
The open questions, in this case are:
1. how do you store this kind of research in a bookshelf? 
2. how do you render the poetic or the expressive parts of the research in a way that allow for Ken's framework criteria (meta-narrativity and openness/transparency to analysis)? (See Ken's post on 13.12.08)
Ciao
Nicola

Nicola Morelli, PhD
Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Design
Aalborg University
blog: nicomorelli.wordpress.com
wiki: servicedesign.wikispaces.com
skype: nicomorelli



-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Chris Rust
Sent: 14. december 2008 11:57
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Inventing Research Methods

Ken Friedman wrote:
> I'm still grateful for the fact that my PhD supervisor explained why I could not write my PhD thesis in blank verse.

That's right...but

I was lucky enough to take part in a debate in Dublin earlier this year, 
about research in the creative and performing arts. One of the speakers 
was Jools Gilson-Ellis, who read some passages from her PhD thesis (She 
is a performer based in Cork, did her PhD at University of Surrey).

Another speaker at the event had talked rather loosely about the idea 
that artists should be free to write in an ironic or allusive style, 
even in research, I found this very difficult to take on because in 
research you are responsible for explaining what you have done. Irony 
and allusion are exacting tools and require a degree of complicity 
between writer and audience which is not appropriate for a PhD thesis. 
(I don't want to confuse this with the shared disciplinary knowledge and 
vocabulary that might be appropriate to a particular thesis)

I felt that Jools had solved this problem very well. She wanted to 
include what I would call "poetic" writing in her thesis where she was 
seeking to convey experience directly, as somebody else might do by 
using images or other media. In doing that she might have separated such 
writing very explicitly from the argumentative part of the thesis but 
instead she took the riskier path, at least as far as I, the listener, 
could tell without seeing the page, of combining the two kinds of 
writing in a single text. The clever part was that it was immediately 
clear which style of writing you were listening to - I could easily 
distinguish between passages where I was being offered an experience and 
others where I was given an explanation.

Which makes it clear to me why the artefacts of research are so 
important and they cannot be dealt with simply by cursory descriptions. 
It is only by experiencing them that we can be confident of 
understanding what is being addressed in the arguments. In many fields 
this can be done by reference to shared experience, if a laboratory 
technique is widely used a researcher will assume that readers have the 
experience to interpret the thesis.  But in a "wicked" field, where we 
might have the same description for wildly different artefacts or 
experiences, there is no reliable touchstone and we must reveal the 
particular nature of our research material as best we can.

Now I must wrestle with the problem of revealing to our neighbours the 
particular nature of the brunch we are offering next Sunday. Last year I 
found a perfect image of waffles and fresh fruit on the internet, sadly 
I've deleted the file and now Google can't find it for me. Always hold 
on to the raw data, you never know when you'll need it again.

Chris