Hi Kari,
Great posting setting out the state of the art in 'Research through Design'
How you describe 'research through design' seems to be identical to what
elsewhere is called 'Research and Development' (R&D)?
If so, then there are a few decades of journals, books and papers on
concepts, theories, methods and methodologies of 'Research and
Development' that could be expected to be easily arbitraged. Or else
perhaps 'research through design' could simply revert its name to 'research
and development'?
There is already some transition back to the original 'research and
development' in design fields. See, for example,
http://www2.uiah.fi/projekti/metodi/169.htm
http://crds.jst.go.jp/en/about/pdf/11xr01e.pdf
and a nice course in R&D at Swinburne see
http://courses.swinburne.edu.au/subjects/Research-and-Development-Project-1-
HET101/local
Best wishes,
Terry
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-----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 Kari
Kuutti
Sent: Wednesday, 7 November 2012 5:15 PM
To: Dr Terence Love
Subject: 'Research through design' as a methodological program (was: Looking
for other constructive design researchers)
Marianne Markowski asked,
how to apply 'constructive research' or 'research through design' correctly.
This is an acute and important question - although pretty difficult to
answer. Let's ponder the 'research through design' part a bit further.
'Research through design' is rather high on the list of current hot
buzzwords, and it is used for a wide variety of ways and for different
purposes, and quite often with such a flavor as if there would already exist
a well-defined stepwise *method* of 'research through design', so any
confusion is understandable.
The term or phrase itself has been criticized and indeed it is no good, but
with respect to design research as academical discipline there is a healthy
core concept hiding under it: an approach to do academical research where
design, development, and use of an artifact is utilized for creation of data
for that research. In the "pure" form the developed artifact has no other
use; it is a research prototype that has fulfilled its purpose when the data
has been extracted. In the "piggyback" form the research effort is sitting
on the shoulders of a real development project that tries to create
something useful for real world.
('Academical' is here just an index to such research where the goal is the
communication of results to a research community.)
Now this is probably the "native" form of doing academical design research,
and our core strength when compared to other disciplines: instead of taking
an outsider observer position, we go "in" and purposefully change our
research subject, and by that changing have much better possibilities to see
also the hidden connections. And in the end of the day a considerable part
of our new knowledge is condensed and crystallized in the form of the new
artifact - in principle much more easily analyzable and generalizable than,
for instance, what action researchers in organizations (who also go "in")
have in their hands: changed attitudes, work habits, forms of interaction.
So far so good: we have an unique foundation any discipline could be proud
of; if there were a solid methodology for 'research through design', our
disciplinary turf would be secure forever. (We are anyway going to need a
bunch of different methods, say, one for studying development processes,
other for artifacts in use, and so on, and a discussion about their coverage
and validity, and a justification why they work - and the totality of such
bunch and discussions is called a methodology...). But then there is the
problem that we do not yet have such methodology - in fact, we do not yet
really have the particular methods either... Of course such work has been
practiced since long, and various experiences have been collected and
recorded, but honestly: nobody has yet an idea how to 'correctly' do
'research through design'.
I think that there is now a general awareness that operationalizing
'research through design' would be a good idea, and most astute members of
the community, such as John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi and Erik Stolterman (as
cited in previous messages) have been already a while outlining a research
program to start such work. The development of a methodology, however, is
not a work of a single researcher but the whole community. And it is not an
armchair job either; the empirical experience of doing research has be
brought to bear in all phases of the community discussion. This discussion
has started, but it could be more prominent and more systematical, a
persistent subtheme whenever design researchers publicly (or privately)
meet.
Method development is not enough alone: the eyeglasses we have inherited
from arts, human and social sciences or technology development are probably
not sufficient for the new purpose. When we do 'research through design', we
need a point of our own, where to look at, and how to conceptualize what we
see. Our current understanding of the artifact-practice relationship is not
yet distinctive enough. In this respect there already has been interesting
recent openings, for example John Bowers' and Bill Gaver's trilogy of
papers on 'annotated portfolios' is an attempt to generate a new way to
discuss about and evaluate artifacts.
So, Marianne, your question is excellent; my apologies that the answer is no
better - as a research community we should just work harder to get there...
:-)
--Kari Kuutti
Univ. Oulu, Finland
PS. There is in fact a very illustrative example on "research through
design" practiced by a research community over decades, and that is
Artificial Intelligence research, where building new computer programs
capable to do some novel trick has been always the major device for
research. People have used artifacts as a way of elaborating their questions
and answering them, and the scientific discussion took place around the
artifacts. Phil Agre (an AI researcher that later become a social scientist)
has written a couple of insightful pieces about that. Contentwise, I dare
not suggest AI as the role model, but - mutatis mutandis - something a bit
similar might happen in DR, and at least in HCI as well.
Gaver, W. W. (2012). What should we expect from research through design?
CHI'12 (pp. 937 - 946). Austin, Texas.
Bowers, John {2012} The logic of annotated portfolios: communicating the
value of 'research through design'. Proceedings of DIS'12: Designing
Interactive Systems, 68--77 Gaver, Bill & Bowers, John (2012) Annotated
Portfolios. interactions vol19. no 4 pp.40-49
Agre, Phil: The Soul Gained and Lost: Artificial Intelligence as a
Philosophical Project, Stanford Humanities Review 4(2), 1995, pages 1-19.
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/shr.html
Agre, Phil: Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying
to Reform AI in Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, William Turner, and
Les Gasser, eds, Social Science, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work:
Beyond the Great Divide, Erlbaum, 1997.
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/critical.html
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