Hi Ken,
The new academic year is imminent and I shall soon have little time to look at this list. As it is, I am short of time today but wanted to get back to you as this subject is, for me, by far the most crucial one that comes up on the list. I can’t hope to cover everything in the time available so will just select a few of your comments and respond to them briefly. Most of what you have written is in the form of lengthily stated views that you have expressed many times before on this list. As always, you go on to tell us all what doctoral research ‘is’. I wouldn’t expect to change those views but it is important to understand that creative practice-led research is well established in the UK art schools. This was important and much needed change, addressing issues that were not remotely given consideration when art schools were integrated into universities. Change is never easy for everyone.
If my comments sound brusque or dogmatic in tone, I apologise. It is only in the interests of brevity. They are only my opinions!
“One of the key challenges in research is to understand what we are saying to one another.”
Correct
“This requires developing and calibrating a shared vocabulary. Those who do research in mathematics, law, and medicine did this long ago. Those who do research in design have not. Thus we still have problems and debates on words and what they mean as well as on substantive issues in our field.”
There is a reason why “Those who do research in design have not.” It’s because ‘Design’, most particularly within the realm of the expressive arts, is not comparable to mathematics, law or medicine. I am surprised if you feel that the shared vocabulary of words is a reliable barrier against misunderstanding. Does the recent debate on this list under this current heading support that view? Perhaps the answer here (restating my previously stated views) is for all of us to stop pretending that the process of designing a picture book or a wedding dress belongs under the same academic umbrella as designing a sewage system.
“We only transfer what we KNOW from one mind to another through the medium of words.”
Wrong. Very wrong. In practice-led research we transfer and disseminate what we know through evidence of the working process- drawings, storyboards, visual narratives in development. At least as articulate than words can be in my subject area. This is important.
“We may demonstrate what we know and coach others in developing their own practical skills, but these practical skills are in part different from the forms of general knowledge that arise from research — and even from the forms of particular, experiential knowledge that involve research as distinct from practice alone.”
Here you are making the common mistake of separating ‘skill’ (what you describe as ‘practical skill’) from thinking. We have been here before so forgive me if I don’t explain again. My personal mission is to dispel this myth, which has been used for so long by academics to justify their positions as the only ones able to give meaning to things created by those innately ‘skillful’ artists and designers. I try to avoid using the word 'skill' if at all possible.
“Demonstrating outcomes does not describe or demonstrate the process by which we achieve those outcomes.”
Almost correct. But the process/ developmental work certainly does. And sometimes, depending on the nature of the outcome, the outcome will embody the working process in an evident, communicable way. I have previously cited Scott McCloud’s ‘Understanding Comics’ as a great example of this. It is not only McCloud’s knowing through practice that makes this such an important contribution to knowledge, it is his ability to express that knowledge through the very medium about which he is writing/ drawing.
"The problem we often face in practice-led research is that no artifact is constitutes (sic) a full research outcome. While an artefact may be part of the outcome, no artifact can narrate the research metanarrative. The research metanarrtive describes the research activities that take place in the researcher’s mind and it describes the activities that take place during the research process."
See above. You are repeating the same point. A practice-led research degree will include textual commentary as much as is needed, commonly 30- 40,000 words.
"You are right that designers should be able to demonstrate what one, and you are right that showing that one can do something is a way of demonstrating skill."
I am neither right nor wrong as I didn't say it! Not sure what you are trying to say here but whatever it is, you are misattributing to me. ‘Demonstrating skill’ has little to do with this discussion. We are discussing research, and how it can be pursued through making.
"Medical journals help physicians to understand the how and why of medical procedures, and physicians can study and make use of procedures by reading the words and explanations of their colleagues."
"Simply seeing the results of a successful procedure are not at all the same."
See above- same point, same answers. You are telling me things I already know again. Medicine is not design, and is used too often (sometimes lazily) as an example of an apparent equivalent.
Now I shall quote Bruce Archer, even though he too uses the ‘S word’ (sorry, no time to provide careful references/ dates)
“In design, the repository of knowledge is not only the material culture and the contents of the museums but also the executive skills of the doer and maker. “
“For all sorts of reasons, although the collected body of artifacts has been valued by scientists and scholars, if only as subjects for their own kind of post hoc scholarship, the collected body of executive skill in the Design area has not.”
Archer identified the major failing in education that I am sure you are not keen to perpetuate. He spoke of the nonsense of the idea of the ‘Three Rs’- Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic’.
“Reading and writing are the passive and active sides, respectively, of the language skill, whilst arithmetic is the subject matter of that other skill which, at the lower end of school, we tend to call ‘number’. So the expression ‘the three Rs’ only refers to two ideas: language and number.”
He claimed that his Great Aunt had a far more sensible version-
1. Reading and writing
2. Reckoning and figuring
3. Wroughting and wrighting
“By wroughting she meant knowing how things are brought about, which we might now call technology. By wrighting she meant knowing how to do it, which we would now call craftsmanship.”
The reason that I feel so passionately about practice-led research in my subject is because no amount of external ‘academic’ study can compensate for the limitations in understanding that come from the researcher’s lack of experiential knowledge of creating. This has badly skewed research into children’s picturebooks which has hitherto been almost entirely conducted (much to the general dismay of those more closely involved in the subject) in the manner that you champion as the only way.
Just to reiterate- only my opinions!
Best wishes on a late summer day,
Martin
Professor Martin Salisbury
Course Leader, MA Children's Book Illustration
Director, The Centre for Children's Book Studies
Cambridge School of Art
0845 196 2351
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