Ken,
Read more carefully. The reference (Love, 2000) was provided only to explain the meta-theoretical analysis tool - which it does.
Tim asked for ' citations to published work, how you have found Popper’s Three Incommensurate Worlds view to be useful in testing some theory of designing. Just asserting that you have found it useful does nothing for the discussion. And please note, I say theory of designing, not any kind of theory. So, let’s keep the discussion relevant to the topic, please. '
I declined Tim's request.
Instead, I described how Popper's Three worlds view could be used to benefit the testing of design theories, and I did so simply and clearly in a self-evident manner. If you have any criticism of the process I described, you are open to share it here , and I look forward to it Otherwise, it is reasonable to assume that you agree with the three stage use mode of testing design theory that I presented. Rhetorically complaining about other issues is a diversion .
In 2000 at La Clusaz (which you chaired) I described in detail problems with the design theory literature and that much of it does not stand up to critical review, nor has it been subjected to the necessary critical review. You agreed. Surprisingly, you seem to have forgotten that one of the few sentence by sentence critical reviews of a design theory document was the one you commissioned me to do and you edited. This was a critical analysis of the book Visualizing Research by Grey and Malins (*1). You are well aware of the problem of design theory being contradicted by other theories and are being disingenuous in pretending otherwise.
At La Clusaz, I made the offer (repeated also in the mid-2000s on this list) that if anyone sent me ANY design publication or design theory that they felt would stand up to critical analytical scrutiny then I would analyse it, given time. The offer is still open. Please feel free to send your own publications and theories.
You wrote ' Then, we need to see proof of contradiction “by well-established theories in other disciplines.” This requires identifying the contradictory theories from other, well-establish disciplines, identifying contradictory theory each with a proper reference to the source document so that I can find it for myself to see whether it has been represented adequately.'
You mean you would like me to do the work for you? Well in the time this evening I can do a little - especially for you.
Here is a short example of analysis, on a sample of design theory reasoning taken at random from the first of your papers I came across on the web via the Google search phrase "Ken Friedman papers". The paper is K. Friedman, Theory construction in design research: criteria: approaches, and methods, Design Studies Vol 24 No. 6 November 2003.
<snip - your paper> Until recently, the field of design has been an adjunct to art and craft.
Response:
Wrong. Engineering Design and its design theory literature followed from engineering practices rather than art or craft. Nor is the field of design recent. The trajectory of publication in the UK, at least, includes the IMechE Proceedings archives 1847 onwards (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/archive.sp ) and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society including in 1675 (http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/112-122.toc )details about the design of 'very exact and portative watches' by M. Hugens (http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/112-122.toc ).
<snip - your paper> With the transformation of design into an industrial discipline come responsibilities that the field of design studies has only recently begun to address. Design is now becoming a generalizable discipline that may as readily be applied to processes, interfaces between media or information artifacts as to tools, clothing, furniture, or advertisements.
Response:
Wrong. At your time of writing many areas of Engineering design were already completely established as 'generalizable' disciplines for the design of processes, interfaces between media or information artifacts as to tools, clothing, furniture (see, for example, the history of the IMechE (http://heritage.imeche.org/mechengtimeline) and the Royal Society . An overview of the history of engineering design is presented by Fil Salustri at http://deed.ryerson.ca/~fil/t/history0.html (not sure if this is his correct version). The essence of theories enabling engineering design approaches to be generalizable across disciplines was its use of a suite of mathematical models across all engineering design disciplines.
<snip - your paper>To understand design as a discipline that can function within any of these frames means developing a general theory of design.
Response:
Wrong on several counts. It appears to be pure speculation as there is no reasoning presented in the paper and no reference to proof from elsewhere. First, it is contradicted by many other disciplines. For English Literature, there is no 'general theory of English'. None of the Science or technology disciplines depend on having 'a General Theory' for their existence. There is no 'General Theory of Psychology'. Secondly, and not addressed in your paper, the central support and defining feature of the science and technology disciplines is their use of a tightly defined representational language, Mathematics, to enable more precise discussion, critical analysis, representation and prediction. A simplistic discussion of this issue is at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
I'm happy to review more design theories - just post them to the list.
On a different tack, you express criticism of me publishing my ideas and analyses to PhD-Design. You seem to do this privileging the viewpoint of scholarly activity. I don't. Undertaking research, doing analyses, creating theories, making things and managing small organisations and projects are things I do. In part I do them because of the delight in doing them and in part to earn money. As I wrote to Viktor some time ago, although I've a PhD in engineering design and published many refereed papers, and lectured and researched in universities and colleges for 25 years, I'm not a scholar. For me, the main aims of any work in this area are practical: to get new useful ideas and theories into the marketplace; to identify and draw attention to problem areas of theory and practice; and to identify better theories, or at least better strategies, for undertaking design research, theory-making, design practice and design education.
Reviewing papers for various conferences and journals, I come across ideas I've posted years before in PhD-Design sometimes identifiable by specific terms and phrases I've used or devised. Recently, I've started asking people to reference my ideas when they use them. Is that unreasonable?
On another tack in your rant, you claim only Tim had the mathematical mastery of models in a paper I quoted to explain why it was seriously flawed. Wow - the maths wasn't that hard. You made two mistakes in your comments though. First, at the time, you obviously misunderstood the reason for quoting the paper as an exemplar. In part that appeared to be because you were trying to rethink what I wrote to fit your way of thinking, and in part I suspect due to lack of skill in dynamic systems concepts and the associated maths to understand the paper. Second, Tim was mistaken in his interpretation of the mathematical analysis. If Tim would like to take that up separately with me I'm happy to do so.
Finally, you claim <snip - your email>' The qualitative human sciences, along with *thick description approaches* to anthropology, much history, and most literature resist quantization'.
Response:
This appears to be wrong on multiple counts. First, it appears to be a fallacious rhetoric misdirection - an elision ( a bit like 'fish' resist being treated as 'monkeys' ) that specifies one aspect of human sciences (thick description) and implies it represents the whole. For the purposes of designing better human outcomes, the use of quantification and dynamic modelling is already well established in human science disciplines such as anthropology, social development, history, and literature (for the latter think semantic analysis). Second, quant system methods such as soft systems have been addressing thick description human science situations since the 80s (think Checkland and try for example, http://www.construction-innovation.info/images/pdfs/Research_library/ResearchLibraryA/Refereed_Conference_papers/Five_Case_Studies.pdf ). Third, those involved in research involving 'thick descriptions' in human sciences such as anthropology have over the last two decades become enthusiastic about quantifying thick descriptions to the point that there is much software available for the task (think NVivo, and see, for example, http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR9-4/ozkan.pdf ). Practically, I suggest systems modelling approaches potentially offer greater depth of understanding of situations requiring 'thick descriptions' especially as such situations become more complex.
Reference
*1 Love, T. (2006). Book Review: Gray, Carole, and Julian Malins. 2004. Visualizing Research. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. DESIGN RESEARCH NEWS DRS Digital Newsletter, 11(5). Available http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2006/G&M_review.htm
Regards,
Terry
==
Dr Terence Love, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
PhD, B.A. (Hons) Eng, P.G.C.E
School of Design and Art, Curtin University, Western Australia
Psychology and Social Science, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia
Honorary Fellow, IEED, Management School, Lancaster University, UK
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks, Western Australia 6030
[log in to unmask] +61 (0)4 3497 5848
==
-----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 Ken Friedman
Sent: Thursday, 20 December 2012 2:29 PM
To: Dr Terence Love
Subject: Re: Testing design theory - Popper¹s three worlds (was Œdesign theorytesting¹)
Dear Tim, Terry, and All,
Tim asked that Terry, “…please, show us, with citations to published work, how you have found Popper’s Three Incommensurate Worlds view to be useful in testing some theory of designing. Just asserting that you have found it useful does nothing for the discussion. And please note, I say theory of designing, not any kind of theory. So, let’s keep the discussion relevant to the topic, please.”
In response to Tim’s query, Terry wrote: “You asked for citations to published work. This is an area in which reasoning directly currently works better than references because the material is limited and much of it is as flawed as design theories themselves and appears to be so for the same reasons. I’ve referenced the literature identifying the flaws in design theory in an earlier paper.”
Terry’s paper – “Philosophy of Design: a Meta-theoretical Structure for Design Theory” – does not provide specific examples of problems in the literature or Terry’s use of Popper’s Three Worlds in addressing these problems. Terry’s article refers to examples in the literature as examples of approaches and genres. At no point does he specifically give examples of “design theories [that] are contradicted by well-established theories in other disciplines.”
Neither does this article do what Tim asks. This is an abstract, meta-theoretical article that sets out meta-theoretical issues, as the title states. It does not provide the examples that Tim requested.
Reasoning directly does not solve all problems. Some issues require situated evidence. Terry’s arguments here are beginning to sound very much like the strange, abstract use of the term “theory” among post-modern literature scholars.
In his response to Tim, Terry asserts that “design theories are contradicted by well-established theories in other disciplines.”
I would like to see specific examples of “design theories [that] are contradicted by well-established theories in other disciplines.”
To make sense of this statement, we need to see the design theories in situ. This requires that Terry identify several specific theories, each with a proper reference to the source document so that I can find it for myself to see whether it has beenrepresented adequately.
Then, we need to see proof of contradiction “by well-established theories in other disciplines.” This requires identifying the contradictory theories from other, well-establish disciplines, identifying contradictory theory each with a proper reference to the source document so that I can find it for myself to see whether it has been represented adequately.
Without this information, Terry’s claims remain abstract. In the absence of evidence that allows us to examine and possibly to falsify Terry’s claims, there is no way to determine whether Terry’s statements are even meaningful in Popper’s terms.
The notion Terry raised in an earlier post about the PhD-Design list as a forum for “agile rapid testing of ideas and theory building and testing by contradiction” seems quite problematic to me. Reading Terry’s reply to Tim, I understand the earlier note better. Terry writes, “PhD-Design is a publication and the main way that I publish.” It doesn’t make this list a reasonable forum for “agile rapid testing of ideas and theory building and testing by contradiction,” but it does explain why Terry might believe it to be.
The world’s best and most famous forum for ““agile rapid testing of ideas and theory building” with contradiction and scientific or scholarly debate is arXiv. This open access resource was formerly the Los Alamos National Laboratory server for papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics. (If you want to know more, Google arXiv. Wikipedia has a reasonable article about the project, including a review ofcriticism and controversies.)
The reason arXiv works so well, with more than 800,000 e-prints to date over the past two decades, is that people upload serious work. People read, work through, anddebate these papers because these are pre-prints or e-prints of the real papers that scientists in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics write and present at peer-reviewed conferences and journals. Each paper uploaded to the arXiv server is moderated to ensure seriousness. Papers published on the arXiv server are generally full papers, presented with full argumentation. All necessary evidence is included in each paper, together with full references.
That permits agile repaid idea testing and theory building.
Terry is essentially saying that he’s decided to make PhD-Design his journal of choice. This relies on the fact that everyone has the right to post to this list whatever he or she wishes to post. While that is correct, making this one’s main form of publication is a solipsistic approach to research. I imagine that one might quote the list from time to time for an example of a well-formed idea, but one would not want to use it as a source of ideas or theories that ought properly to be built on peer-reviewed literature. One can use the New York Times or The Economist as a source of ideas, or even Scrooge McDuck or Majesty – the Quality Royal Magazine. One can use reputable news magazines for statistics, facts, and reporting. One can use Uncle Scrooge or the latest Pippa story as examples of – well, of something. One can’t build an acceptable peer-reviewed article using these for theory or validated empirical research findings, and one can’t make use of the PhD-Design list that way, either.
As far as “agile rapid testing of ideas and theory building and testing by contradiction,” the only contradiction to Terry’s ideas that appears here comes up when serious scholars such as Tim take the time to contradict Terry. Terry’s pseudo-scientific language and stacks of links make this too great a challenge for younger scholars. They may sense that something is wrong with Terry’s claims, but the amount of material is too large to permit anyone to wade through it without solid research experience and a large stock of background knowledge. Without that kind of foundation, it’s hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. This is why most of the people willing to debate Terry are folkslike Tim, Klaus, or myself.
But Terry also makes this a forbidding enterprise for experienced scholars by using unreferencedclaims. You’ve got to know the literature well enough to identify problematic issues, conceptual flaws, and irresponsible truth claims. When pushed for examples, Terry provides stacks of links to literature that is often irrelevant or incorrect, and reviewing these often takes too much time to permit a robust argument.
The most astonishing example of an irrelevant and incorrect document was an 80-page working paper on Byzantine economic history over a millennium that Terry provided to show us his idea of what design history ought to be. Only Tim had deep enough mastery of the mathematical models in that paper to explain why it was seriously flawed. Terry refers to the value of abstract mathematics to render issues from many disciplines into an abstract, numerical language. There are two problems with this approach. First, some fields cannot be rendered mathematical. The qualitative human sciences, along with thick description approaches to anthropology, much history, and most literature resist quantization. The second problem is that Terry often puts sources forward where he himself does not seem to understand the mathematics well enough to make an appropriate statement. In some cases, one must know that a document is incorrect to know why it is irrelevant.
In a recent response to me, Terry stated that my “scholarly approach is and has been valuable to this list. It adds value and detail and provides a conservativeeffect...”
I had to laugh a bit at the somehow political tone of that comment. The word I’d have used is rigorous, and I’d argue that I use logic as well as Terry does. Despite Terry’s frequent pejorative references to rhetoric, my argumentation relies on logic and analysis as much as it relies on rhetoric.
These issues escape attention when Terry avoids answering analytical questions as he so often does with me, and as he does here with Tim.
Tim asked Terry to, “show us, with citations to published work, how you have found Popper’s Three Incommensurate Worlds view to be useful in testing some theory of designing.”
I would like to see specific examples of “design theories [that] are contradicted by well-established theories in other disciplines.”
Terry says these exist. If they do, I’d like to see them – and see them in a specific form, not links to several thousand pages of material that do not actually contain what Terry claims we will find.
Yours,
Ken
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] |Phone +61 3 9214 6102 | http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design
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