This thread has taken off, i should have been more intelligent than starting it right before going on a holiday trip, now being forced to reply from my phone. All evidence shows that this would happen.

Appologies for spellos and being less polished.

I should have replied to many of you even to some misreadings of my post, due to my own fuzzyness.



At least most of you got that i didnt want to start a discussion pro et contra evidence as such but some wrestling around the idea of our composit common ground. What role and place would different types of info, knowledge, practices, skills and talents have within this common ground where evidence based design has a natural place as well as composition.



But the most important issue that has constantly bothered me is the very notion of evidence. To me evidence is about something being proofed beyond reasonable doubt. I think blurring this requirement, beyond reasonable doupt, renders the notion irrelevant.



EBD is proposed as something other and better than what normal designers do. It is portraied by people on this list that designers who do not submit to the EBD paradigm are irresponsible, sloppy, and lesser designers. I was seriously attact and yelled at by a person on these grounds. I simply do not recognise this abyss between what all serious designers i can think of do and EBD, except there is a difference in weighting types of information. Most designers i can think of are doing investigations that include information from various sources, some being evidence beyond reasonable doupt but most being other types of information, spanning from cultural interpretation, cases that are too few to remove doupt but are judged to be valid, patterns and experiences as also Don listed. Now it seems to me that the EBD movement tells us to shift attention from more or less valid sources to evidence beyond reasonable doubt.



If i am wrong about this and EBD has a much wider definition of evidence as some people in this thread propose i think most of us are practicing EBD and have done it for years, so whats the fuzz?



Others have said in this discussion that designers do not evidence their design outcome. If we accept the notion of evidence i use this is a ridicoulous claim since there is normally no way to generate evidence beyond reasonable doubt from one design case. This also indicates that people have a very fluffy conception of the notion of evidence. Also this discussion thread has shown this. There are many such indicators so i really think my confusion and following question is justified.



So my big problem is not evidence as such but that i am totally bewildered about how people on this list and especially EBD proponents use the term. As far as i know the volume of EBD is from a very narrow application area where the production of evidence is easier then normally in design.



It would be very good if we could agree on the "beyond reasonable doubt definition". I think that would clarify a lot. And it would stop the idea that evidence can play a dominating role in the information poole because a great deal of the information would be judged not as evidence but to different degrees of validity and handled with care accordingly.



I asked before what constitutes evidence in EBD. I didnt get much clarity then. Does this clear and sharp definition help? Ken asked me a long while ago what i think constitutes evidence. I never got back to an answer because i entangled in the most complex considerations. Here is my simple stupid answer: beyond reasonable doupt. Now it is fair to ask the EBD proponents what are you guys actually talking about when talking about evidence?



My last point: being critical to the EBD paradigm is not the same as being pro slopyness and against evidence. Im not. I simply want to discuss its role in the pluralistic common ground of design



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