All,
Thank you for this thread. I am enjoying it very much.
It is very difficult to ask how design does "research" without becoming
bewitched by scientific research norms or foundationalist attempts to find
powerful arguments in Frayling that frankly aren't there to be found. As
someone trained in the humanities, I have been wondering--sort of an
elaborate thought experiment--what RtD looks like if we imagine it in
relation to a more humanistic conception of inquiry.
So, for example, Mike wrote about design inquiry as a form of
"exploration". I think this understates the rigor and knowledge
contributions at stake.
The novels of Henry James do not merely
"
explore
"
moral life--they systematically interrogate it, situated in a complex world
of particulars, of events, of emotional
resonance
, in a way that rivals Kant's and Rawls' moral philosophy
(Nussbaum). Warhol's Brillo Box does not merely explore popular culture--it
interrogates the
very
theories by which we are able to recognize art as art (Danto). The Aliens
films do not merely explore personhood--they interrogate different
formulations of it, working through the consequences of diverse positions,
and clarify for us what is at stake in these formulations
in our increasingly biotechnical world of the proximal future
(Mulhall).
The tragedies of Shakespeare do not merely explore skepticism; they
interrogate its arguments, work through its psychological motivations and
behavioral consequences, and reveal how disowning knowledge leads to the
un-acknowledgment of our relatedness and mutual obligations (Cavell). Is
not the systematic consideration and critique of different positions and
their consequences knowledge work?
As a humanist I can't help but notice that mature art traditions are
steeped in a deep dialogue with textual expressions: art history and
criticism, essays, and theory and philosophy. The textual dimension
functions, in my view, as a conduit between design processes / objects and
knowledge. Without the essays of people like Nussbaum, Danto, Mulhall, and
Cavell (in this case, all philosophers), I am likely to fail to see the
potentials of these art works to contribute such knowledge. Similarly,
without the great traditions of (literary, art, film) history and
criticism, it is unlikely that Warhol, James, and the directors of the
Aliens films, etc., would have been able to achieve what they did in the
ways that they did. This does not mean that writing stands over the
art--most of us, myself included, intuitively perceive just the
opposite--but there is nonetheless a deep and intimate relationship between
the two.
Now,
Gaver and Bowers have proposed annotated portfolios, and one role of the
annotations is to provide such a connective role. However, annotated
portfolios remain first-person (
i.e.,
in which Gaver annotates Gaver's work). This is welcome indeed. But it is
possible--desirable even--that the community can find knowledge
contributions beyond those intended or imagined by the designer.
So I wonder sometimes whether rather than wringing our hands over the
correct a priori account of how/whether/in what ways designs can contribute
to generalizable knowledge, what it would look like if we devoted some of
our efforts to looking at designs, writing critically and thoughtfully
about what they in fact propose to us (about design, about how to live,
about what can and should change), and how those propositions relate to
other propositions--from the arts and sciences--within the same domain of
inquiry (however we pragmatically define that at the time of the reading).
In this vein,
for the past several years I have been developing an approach to design as
inquiry with an emphasis on design criticism
, and I have had no trouble connecting
design
proposals to relevant thinking in interdisciplinary discourses
, which has implications for design theory and design work in relevant
domains
.
For example, some colleagues and I
(Bardzell et al., 2015)
read Sputniko!'s Menstruation Machine as a form of inquiry into the
constitutive roles of design and gender essentialism in posthumanism
. We
framed this work not as cultural studies but as design research, finding
in the design concrete implications for design materials, the plasticity
and therefore designability of what it means to be "human," and how design
can be used as a method / force for social activism. Are these not
"generalized" forms of knowing, constituting more than mere "explorations"?
I do not pose this as a one-size-fits-all solution, of course. But an
approach that carefully attends to actual designs qua inquiry does help
remind us what we already know--that design is, among other things, a
knowledge discipline.
Best regards,
Jeffrey Bardzell, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Cultural Research in Technology [CRIT] Group
Human-Computer Interaction/Design
Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing
http://crit.soic.indiana.edu/
https://interactionculture.wordpress.com/
REFERENCES
Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S., and Hansen, L. K. (2015). Immodest proposals:
Research through design and knowledge. Proceedings of CHI’15: World
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM: New York.
Bardzell, J., and Bardzell, S. (2013). What is “critical” about critical
design? Proc. of CHI’2013. ACM: New York.
Bardzell, J. Interaction Criticism: An Introduction to the Practice.
Interacting With Computers. Volume 23 Issue 6, November, 2011. Pages
604-621
--
Cavell, S. (1969). Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge UP.
Danto, A. (1981). The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Harvard UP.
Mulhall, S. (2002). On Film. Routledge.
Nussbaum, M. (1990). Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature.
Oxford UP.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
