Dear Peter,

Thanks for your reply. I’m reproducing the entire note because you
raise so many issues.

First, Victor was not advocating “annotated literature sets.” He is
calling for developmental concept mapping through the literature of a
field. The tools for this kind of conceptual development map are the
critical literature review and the bibliographic essay. I had not
earlier mentioned the bibliographic essay -- this is a medium common to
the humanities and to history, but less common in the social sciences
Victor is right. As you note, the literature review article is an
important tool in advancing the knowledge of many fields. I’d have to
ask across fields to learn whether this is as insignificant in medical
research as you suggest. I observe that any kind of work that is
recognized for tenure and promotion – as critical literature review
articles are – tend be seen as significant contributions to the
literature.

The critical literature review was the subject of an extensive thread
earlier this year, and I will return to this again. But a critical
literature review is quite different to an annotated bibliography –
for researchers past the doctorate, the critical literature review is a
way of mapping concepts through the past to address the future
development of a field. On several occasions, I have referred to a
particularly useful article on the subject,

Webster, Jane, and Richard T. Watson. 2002. “Analyzing the Past to
Prepare for the Future: Writing a Literature Review.” Management
Information Science Quarterly Vol. 26 No. 2, (June), xiii-xxiii.

There is also an excellent book:

Hart, Chris. 1998. Doing a Literature Review. Releasing the Social
Science Imagination. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.

The second point is that I was not advocating “annotated literature
sets.” I advocate the value of the annotated bibliography under
certain circumstances. If you’ve been reading the design literature,
you likely haven’t seen annotated bibliographies of the kind I
described, but these are the kinds of rich annotation and thick
description that make an annotated bibliography a useful step on the way
to a critical literature review or a bibliographic essay. These kinds of
notes are more than didactic: they are useful stand-alone research
tools. Such a tool is quite different to the curriculum reading list or
contextual bibliography that accompanies most university courses. An
annotated bibliography is a research tool.

Third, the concerns I address here are those of researchers and
research students. This thread is a series of comments on the research
literature for those researchers and research students. I appreciate the
concerns you raise with respect to practitioners and MDes students, but
this list is PhD-Design, not MDes-Design. My purpose here is to
strengthen the research base of our field. Thus my concern with
effective and well structured annotated bibliographies, as well as with
critical literature reviews.

Fourth, there is no reason in an abstract sense to prevent a tool such
as Zotero from being useful. The problem is the reality: it is an
amateur effort that features poorly organized and uninformative
contributions. I am puzzled by the repeated number of suggestions on
this list that address the lack of practitioner-oriented tools for
research and advanced professional development by suggesting wikis,
wookies, wonkies, and any other kind of amateur tool resembling a Judy
Garland and Mickey Rooney “let’s put on a show” movie from the
1930s. This kind of work doesn’t get done when everyone waits for
someone else to write up an entry in the hope that each entry will
attract another, with the final result being a useful document. Even if
one entry did attract more – and the evidence is that this doesn’t
often happen – it would still need editing, rewriting, and development
to make a tool useful to practitioners. If this is a gap in our
literature, why doesn’t someone do the hard yards and actually write
and develop some of these tools – just as medical researchers write
articles and prepare documents that practicing surgeons and physicians
find useful. Zotero and things like it don’t work. To make them work
would take more work than simply writing up some decent projects that
practitioners can use. There are many who claim that design research
does not serve the practitioner well enough. This is partly true. My
challenge is to suggest that those who know what practitioners need
write these documents rather than complaining about the gap in the
literature. If there is a gap, fill it rather than demanding that those
with a different research focus should shift their attention from the
projects that require their efforts, knowledge, and skill.

On a fifth and slightly different point, I appreciate Rosan’s
suggestion that my faculty take the lead in developing a series of
appropriately rich annotated bibliographies and critical literature
reviews. I will look into this. Before I return to Australia, I’ll
have a conversation with colleagues here in Delft to see who might like
to join in such a venture.

Best regards,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61
39214 6078 | Faculty 


On Tue, 1 Nov 2011 08:41:20 -0400, Peter Jones | Redesign
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

With the discussions about annotated bibliographies, reference lists,
and exchange of references - I’m wondering whose concerns we are
trying to resolve?  Ken Friedman is advocating Victor Margolin’s
interest in seeing the development of annotated literature sets for
different design contexts. This could be considered an exercise in
disciplinary development - and it would be a useful one for graduate
students to contribute. If this were to develop a body of knowledge,
advanced degree learners would find it very useful. They are the ones
exploring the core and the edges of the literature under our guidance.

Faculty already prepare contextual bibliographies with every syllabus.
The course outline and the framing of problems in each session give
context for the readings. Within courses and independent studies we may
require annotated bibliographies. I have to say in my experience I have
not ever seen an annotated bibliography as thorough as the review format
Ken suggests. It’s a very didactic approach, and while useful at the
PhD level for literature mastery, I think it’s too much for the MDes
level, which is a practitioner degree.

Consider other practitioner degrees and the level of learning and risk
they must address in their professions - health sciences and engineering
for example. I’ve been researching and designing information resources
for medical education and biomedical research and I’ve seen no
evidence of this level of literature review in the med schools and
residencies I’ve observed. Medicine has become evidence directed to a
great extent over the last decade or so (although evidence-based
medicine is not the only modality, I see a universal reliance on high
quality evidence for clinical decision making). Yet, the practitioners
and learners themselves are not creating bibs – they (almost
universally) are weaving readings into practice cases, holding journal
club sessions with faculty, and are talking about controversies and
exceptions in topical conferences.  And yes, annotated materials are
employed in these session, called review articles, a scholarly survey of
the literature around a condition or clinical problem. Authors get
credit for their publication, they are used in education, but the
annotated bib per se is not a major learning device in medicine.

There’s good support for this kind of problem-oriented sensemaking
approach to learning literature and advancing knowledge.  But the
medical literature has a more canonical structure than design, and I’d
include as well social sciences. The purposes of medical articles being
reviewed are well-understood by their readers. But the purposes of
design research and publication are usually oriented toward  practice
and problems - and design publication styles vary widely from the
iconoclastic to the scientific. Like engineering, design is (more of) a
problem-oriented discipline, and literatures are used for practical
problem investigation more than didactic knowledge building. So perhaps
we need to consider those purposes in new types of reviews that offer
support to practitioners?

What are we using literatures for? Why can’t a list of publications
on Zotero become useful as an emerging reference resource as our
contributions to it yield new insights, that in turn add annotations or
commentary to the lists? Where is our sense of using design thinking to
advance the tools of the trade, as it were? I have more to add to this,
but I’d like to hear more about what the problems are these
bibliographies are intended to address. Are they disciplinary
development, literature mastery, or transdisciplinary problem solving?

Best, Peter

Peter Jones, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Faculty of Design
Strategic Foresight and Innovation

OCAD University
http://DesignDialogues.com