Hello all,
I have been following this thread with excitement.
I appreciate the parallel between medicine and design and, indeed, I have used it to discuss design research in my classes and conversations. However, I think there is a big difference that Birger already noted: whereas medicine researchers deal with a relatively fixed issue –human physiology (e.g. kidneys do not mutate every week), design research deal with constantly changing issues (every design project has undetermined variables).
Perhaps one area of or related to medicine that has a similar design challenges is patient education, which could also be understood as a design area. I have read some clinical trial reports in patient education and they are not as definitive as other medicine evidence (e.g. surgery procedures). Patient education issues that could be addressed by health, design or interdisciplinary researchers are “wicked problems.”
This is precisely Mike’s example about Togo’s clinical trial. Even if Mike would not have had a flawed control group, the generalizability of the evidence would have been limited because some design variables would probably change in most situations. Mike indeed said “My experience taught me that evidence gets harder to obtain the more you try to change systems, cultures, and societies.”
Still, I do think that some aspects of randomized trials are useful for design research, but we need to adjust from a pragmatic worldview. I don’t think large sample trials are worth the investment because of their limited generalizability in other design situations. For this same reason, in patient education and health services research there is a growing interest on qualitative methods (see Pope & Mays, 2006).
I agree with Ken that design evidence is possible and needed. He also suggests that different aspects of design would need different types of data gathering and methods. I just would like to add that pragmatism rather than post-positivism would be the more likely paradigm for most design evidence. Here I agree with Birger, who has noted that design research should be oriented from a pragmatic approach. However, the risk is the proliferation of practitioners that claim the practice is design research using the umbrella of pragmatism (often using the label of “research through design”). So diversity may be an interesting starting point but what we urgently need now is more and more solid publication on design research methodology to guide design research practice. I look forward to Ken’s paper on this.
One last note: evidence gathered within a design project to decide a solution or among possible solution (clinical research) is different from evidence gathered to be applicable to any design project with a category of problems (applied research). I feel that evidence-based design uses more easily clinical research evidence rather than applied.
G. Mauricio Mejía, PhD
Associate professor University of Caldas, Colombia
http://twitter.com/mmejiaramirez
Pope, C., & Mays, N. (2006). Qualitative Methods in Health Research. In C. Pope & N. Mays (Eds.), Qualitative Research in Health Care (3rd edition.). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
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