Hi 
I think the point is much simpler. Design is about making and conceiving stuff at various scales. Most so called design research is laughably irrelevant to great practitioners. The same is true for great science whose practitioners never think about popper as they go about their nobelian pursuits. The skhole discourse about design and other fields keeps a tiny minority in jobs without really coming up with a proposal that would genuinely adress knowledge and practice in design. Design philosophy and research It's a little hearth in a little room in a mansion of design and people don't actuallly open the door that much. 
-----Original Message-----
From: Terence Love <[log in to unmask]>
To:  <[log in to unmask]>
To: Love, Terence <[log in to unmask]>

Sent: 19/08/2009 11:03:57 AM
Subject: Re: Connecting research to practice/was Who Designs?

Hi Jacques,

I can understand your angst.

It seems people look for the benefits of design research in the wrong place.

To date, it has been enormously more successful to embed the products of
design research in the computer systems that designers use than to try to
teach designers new advances in design knowledge.

That way, design research outcomes have radically and beneficially
transformed design practices without the effort of having to try to teach
the new design theory developments and knowledge to either design educators
or design practitioners.

This has led naïve design professionals to think that there have been no
useful advances through design research for practice.

The reality is that design professionals now produce  around 800% more work
per day and of much higher quality. It's just that the benefits of the new
design knowledge and the improvement in the skill that  produce the improved
design output faster reside primarily in the software rather than designers'
personal design skills. This change has happened across all design fields.
It is most noticeable in Graphic Design, Product Design, Engineering Design
and Software Design.

Some of this is a consequence of research funding. It is far more sensible
to fund research that improves design outcomes  automatically for all
designers than to fund research that will improve design skills of
individual designers provided you persuade/teach them one by one. 

The evidence seems to suggest that in most areas of design, computerized
automation beats craft apprenticeship/studio teaching hands down.

It would be interesting to, very specifically and with strong evidence-based
justification,  identify those areas of design practice that the above is
not true and develop design research in those areas. I'm envisaging
something way on the other side of 'Design as Rhetoric'/'Design as a
systematic process'/'Design as a collaborative social process'.

If this is possible, it would provide a basis for identifying completely new
pathways in design education that are beyond being design software jockeys
(though my feeling is that being a good design software jockey is a sound
profession) and would help identify which areas of design education to dump
from out of design education courses (rhetoric?). 

Many engineering design courses have faced this problem over the last twenty
years in that there is now much less need for mathematical understanding in
engineering than was previously necessary (those dratted successful  design
researchers again!). It has enabled a rethinking of what it means to be a
professional engineering designer/manager and a radical reworking of
engineering education.

Best wishes,
Terry

===

Jacques wrote:
I regularly need to transfer the
theoretical and philosophical debates of my colleagues, no matter how valid
they are, into a position that is more pragmatic and somehow connected to
the realities of contemporary professional design practice.

This conundrum, that is, the apparent disconnect between design research and
its applicability to design practice, has been a recurring theme on this
list.