Erica Ormsby wrote,
—snip—
I found a book call “Doing Research in Design” by Christopher Crouch to be the most practical book specific to design research so far. It explains all methods of research from a designer’s point of view and uses design based examples to demonstrate how research methods can be applied:
—snip—
Dear Erica,
This is not a useful book. It fails to address design research at all — rather, it maps a great deal of information from other fields over onto design while neglecting the design literature entirely.
On 7 March 2015, I posted a careful discussion of this book to the PhD-Design List. You’ll find in in the list archive under the subject header, "Crouch and Pearce: Doing Research in Design.” That post appears below.
The initial request to the list was to find a “good book/source that could teach me about the different methodologies of research.” Crouch and Pearce does not meet that standard. These comments explain why I believe this to be so.
Yours,
Ken Friedman
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"Crouch and Pearce: Doing Research in Design.” Originally posted to PhD-Design on 2015 March 7:
Dear Alun,
In my earlier note, I stated that there were no good general introductions to research and comparative research methodology written from a design perspective. This is the case for Crouch and Pearce's (2012) Doing Research in Design. I did not mention Crouch and Pearce in my earlier notes. Since no one mentioned them, there was no pointing stating that the book is problematic. Now that you’ve recommended Crouch and Pearce, it is appropriate to explain some of the problems that make this a poor introduction to research for design students.
Doing Research in Design seems to be a written version of the casual talks that many design schools use when they introduce general research issues to beginning PhD students. For students from a studio background with no foundation in analysis, rhetoric, or logic, this is worse than no introduction. It gives students a poor foundation for later research. This book attempts to do too much, giving students a pre-cooked summary of topics, much of it wrong. Worse, it does not show students how to examine issues in a critical and analytical manner, and it does not introduce them to useful sources. This is not a focused introduction to research and comparative research methodology written for designers from a design perspective. It is a book seeking a market among design students by mapping generic information from many fields onto research problems in the design field.
While there have been a few well-meant but inadequate reviews of this book, there has been no careful and serious review of the kind Terry Love (2006) gave to Gray and Malins’s Visualising Research. I will not attempt such a review here. I will discuss some of the problems that make Doing Research in Design a bad choice for teaching students about research. No serious researcher would bother with a survey as lacking in detail as this book, so I primarily discuss what makes it a bad choice for students. In the analysis that follows, I provide four detailed examples to support my argument.
While Crouch and Pearce address many of the issues that one would address in a focused introduction, the text offers little more than shallow comments on most issues. A quick review of the six-page reference list shows little concern for problems in design research. A scant two dozen items involve design or design research. Rather, the authors digest ideas from other fields, applying them unsuccessfully to design. This is neither a robust introduction to research methods and research methodology, nor is it an introduction to research methods specifically useful to designers.
Doing Research in Design covers many issues. The table of contents suggests a promising book. The book itself, it fails to fulfill the promise. The discussion of most issues is shallow and weak, and the writing is careless. Here are four specific examples among many:
1) Thinking Productively and Abductive Thinking
The discussion on “thinking productively and abductive thinking” (Crouch and Pearce 2012: 21-24) is a case in point. The book dips into the notion of abductive thinking without defining abduction. Rather than offer concise explanations for induction, deduction, and abduction, the text flirts with each concept by offering examples, some of them incorrect. Consider this example:
“All these categories of thinking are directly applicable to the process of designing. Let us imagine there is an issue with the use of hardwood planks used for flooring in a wooden frame house. Hardwood planks are useful in such construction because they can be screwed down easily to floor beams with power tools, they are hardwearing (unlike soft woods), and they are a material that homeowners find aesthetically attractive. The problem is that they are both expensive and environmentally unsustainable. Thinking deductively, it follows that if hardwood planks have been traditionally used as flooring, and if their use has proven to be successful for practical and aesthetic reasons, then the continued use of wood in some form would be advantageous as a flooring material” (Crouch and Pearce 2012: 23).
This is not an example of deductive syllogism. The premise is: “hardwood planks have been traditionally used as flooring, and ... their use has proven to be successful.” Logical deduction from this premise does not lead to the conclusion that “wood in some form would be advantageous as a flooring material.”
The idea is reasonable as a design conversation, but this is not simply a design conversation. This book is supposedly a text in research and comparative research methodology. It does not properly introduce research students to the concepts of deduction, induction, and abduction.
But this section is worse. In attempting to describe abduction, the authors mention C. S. Peirce and John Dewey, but Crouch and Pearce make no use of the rich legacy of ideas of Peirce or Dewey. Rather, Crouch and Pearce incorrectly paraphrase Peirce’s ideas on abduction, pointing to Peirce's collected works as the source of the incorrect paraphrase. And they do not attribute the book to Peirce himself — rather they incorrectly cite the editors (Hartshorne and Weiss).
The citation error is a minor point. The real problem here is that the authors have not bothered to read Peirce. While there is a relevant discussion in Peirce (1934), nearly no one reads the 500-page first edition partially cited in Crouch and Pearce (2012). Neither does anyone read the 944-page (Peirce 1935) second edition. Instead, anyone who actually reads Peirce (1992, 1998) today uses the two-volume edition from Indiana University Press. It contains the key papers on abductive thinking, both the definitive concepts and Peirce’s warnings on potential problems in using abductive thinking.
References that show an author has not read the cited material raise two red flags. The incorrect citation shows that the authors apparently did not consult the actual book. Rather, they referred to the book on the assumption that it contains the ideas they paraphrase incorrectly.
The failure to read the actual material is the first problem. This involves content. When an author paraphrases and cites unread material, the content is likely to be wrong. That’s the case here.
But there is a second red flag. Citing material that an author has not read misrepresents the research behind a book. This is hardly the example to set for a book on how to do research. I cannot state that the authors did not read Peirce for themselves. If they did, however, I am puzzled that they cited the wrong authors, and that they did not point to the precise location for the ideas they discuss. It is unreasonable to imagine that design students will read through a 500-page book to find out whether a one-sentence paraphrase is correct. It is not, but design students won’t know this, and they will not realise that most of the examples given for deduction, induction, and abduction are incorrect.
For example, Crouch and Pearce (2012: 22) claim that the presence of an orange peel on a kitchen table permits one to deduce that a complete orange has been present in the kitchen or a person eating one. One cannot deduce from the evidence. Deductive logic requires a complete chain of secure reasoning. This is why deductive logic is conceptually secure, and why induction and abduction are not. If all premises are true, correct deductive logic leads to true conclusions.
One cannot conclusively deduce from an orange peel on a kitchen table that a whole orange has been in the kitchen. It is possible. It is even probable. But it is not deductively true. A friend once sent me an overnight courier package containing, among other things, an orange peel. The package came from California. I was in New York. I opened the package and placed the peel on a table. Had anyone seen the still-fresh peel, they might have inferred from it the recent presence of a fresh orange, or the case that I had recently eaten an orange. Both conclusions would have been wrong. This is an example of abduction, not deduction, and it demonstrates why Peirce warned us against trusting abduction alone.
2) Wicked Problems
Another example of why the book is problematic is visible in the discussion of wicked problems from pages 24-26. This is a case of flabby writing with significant conceptual errors. There is no reason for this. Rittel and Webber (1973: 161-167) define wicked problems in ten precise points that can easily be quoted in one paragraph, or a short list (see, f.ex., Buchanan 1992: 16). For that matter, the authors might well have made us of Buchanan’s (1992) classic article on wicked problems in design thinking. This is one of the most widely cited articles in the design literature, and a good opportunity to show students how serious researchers build on ideas, extending and developing them, and applying them to design.
Once again, however, the authors paraphrase incorrectly material they have not read carefully. In fact, another incorrect citation once again suggests that the authors did not read Rittel and Webber for themselves. They know that Rittel coined the term, but they do not understand it properly. The concept of the wicked problem is precisely defined — while the concept it subtle and somewhat ambiguous, the definition is clear.
It is clear that Crouch and Pearce (2012: 25) have not carefully read the definitive literature where they argue that the best metaphor for the relationship between tame problems and wicked problems is that tame problems sit within wicked problems. This is not the case for major classes of tame problems. A tame problem is a well defined, computable problems, or any of several kinds of well-understood problems. Among these are many kinds of tame problems that do not lead to externalities or to linkages with other problems. This is the case for many technical, scientific, and mathematical problems, and it is the case for some limited but still major ranges of social problems. These kinds of tame problems are not wicked in their own right, nor are they embedded in wicked problems.
3) Theoretical Lenses for Research
The same kinds of problems appear in the sections epistemology and on theoretical lenses (Crouch and Pearce 2012: 57-58, 59-62). This is a porridge of words and ideas. The authors mix things up, jumble them together, and finally become incorrect through their lack of clarity. It would take ten times as many words to unpack the assumptions and inadequacies of this little section.
4) Hermeneutic Research, Interpretation, and Hermeneutic Analysis
On point after point, they state a term. Each term seems to function as a label for concepts, rather like the section label on a library shelf. They draw freely on inconsequential articles while ignoring the key thinkers or the crucial distinctions that could make these concepts useful to research students. Hermeneutics is a case in point. The book discusses hermeneutic research and interpretation (Crouch and Pearce 2012: 59-61) and hermeneutic analysis (Crouch and Pearce 2012: 105-106).
This particular issue demonstrates a major flaw in this book. Hermeneutics involves a theoretical lens, a rich research tradition dating back more than two thousand years, a philosophical approach, and a series of research methods. Trying to address these issues in a mere five pages is impossible. What is possible is to concisely define the issues, pointing readers to serious textbooks by major thinkers. Instead, the authors quote one crucial thinker (Hans-Georg Gadamer) only through a quote taken from a textbook on adult education and post-modernism. They make no use of the serious textbooks on hermeneutics to which they might have directed students. For that matter, had they read any of the key texts themselves, they might possibly have done a better job explaining hermeneutic research and hermeneutic analysis. Instead, they seem to think that any form of interpretation can be labeled as hermeneutic analysis. This is not the case for a tradition that has developed a specific and robust series of analytical methods. While all hermeneutic analysis is interpretive, not all interpretative analysis is hermeneutic. An introductory textbook on research and research methods should do more than run through term after term, dispensing peremptory and shallow descriptions of each term. The challenge for a textbook of this sort is to read on a range of issues far wider than any one author can master, summarising each issue well enough to describe it carefully. The authors should also introduce readers who wish to go further on any topic to the authors who really have mastered the subject.
This covers the major ground. I have no criticism of Christopher Crouch as a person — he is a delightful man and an excellent teacher. He is a good researcher in his field of expertise and he has done some fine writing. This book is not his best effort. I don’t know Jane Pearce, but I’m sure that she, too, has done better work in her field of expertise.
The problem with this book is that it is difficult to do a decent survey text on research and comparative research methodology when one is not expert in the issues that these entail. The kinds of conversational overview sessions one might give to students can be fleshed out with supplementary material and we can point students to expert sources. None of this happens in a book of this sort, and when teachers who are not themselves expert enough to recognise the flaws in a book like this use it as a text, students get a bad education. That is the problem here.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University Press | Launching in 2015
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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References
Buchanan, Richard. 1992. “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.” Design Issues, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 5-21.
Crouch, Christopher, and Jane Pearce. 2012. Doing Research in Design. London: Berg.
Love, Terence. 2006. “Review of Carole Gray and Julian Malins (2004) Visualizing Research.” Design Research News, Vol. 11, No. 5. Accessible at URL:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind06&L=design-research&P=R8424&1=design-research&9=A&I=-3&J=on&d=No+Match%3BMatch%3BMatches&z=4 <https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind06&L=design-research&P=R8424&1=design-research&9=A&I=-3&J=on&d=No+Match;Match;Matches&z=4>
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1934. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volume 5, Pragmatism and Pragmaticism. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1935. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes V and VI: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism and Scientific Metaphysics. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1992. The Essential Peirce. Vol. 1. Edited by Nathan Houser, Christian Kloesel, and the Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1998. The Essential Peirce. Vol. 2. Edited by Nathan Houser, Christian Kloesel, and the Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Rittel, Horst W. and Melvin M. Webber. 1973. Policy Sciences 4 (1973), pp. 155-169.
Trochim, William M. K. 2001. The Research Methods Knowledge Base. Cincinnati, Ohio: Atomic Dog Publishing.
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Alun Price wrote:
A good reference that looks at design as research and other approaches is: DOING RESEARCH in DESIGN / Christopher CROUCH and Jane Pearce. Oxford: Berg, 2012.
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