Hi Ali,
Thanks for your comment. I’ve been doing little studies of the type you describe for a long time.
They don’t have to be statistical to have validity. That is only necessary if what you want to do is representative of an entire population and the differences you are looking for are quantifiable by their nature. Often we are interested in a qualitative difference between using one approach rather than another or between one type of outcome and another.
Unfortunately, prevailing research teaching in universities in areas like education, social science, psychology, and marketing treat statistical methods as a rite of passage. You have to use them to prove you are a researcher. Silly stuff.
One of the most important early papers I published about new methods in design and design education had no statistics .
Sless, David. “Image Design and Modification: An Experimental Project in Transforming.” Information Design Journal 1, no. 2 (1979): 74–80.
It’s now become part of our standard practice in discovering faults in designs. In that context we do count the number of faults at each iteration and we look to see a reduction over the repeat testing and refinement. But we don’t have to do a statistical analysis to know whether or not we have eliminated faults or not. As I’ve said before on this list. it’s a bit like clinical practice in medicine where you look for symptoms of pathology and then apply a treatment. You then look to see if the symptoms disappear.
BTW, I was told anecdotally by a colleague, Clive Richards, that he used to use the method in his own teaching. Might be worth a try.
David
--
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Professor David Sless BA MSc FRSA
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> On 11 May 2018, at 3:28 pm, Ali Ilhan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Dear David,
>
> What a great post! If I may, I would like to go on a tangent, which I
> believe is related to the problems that you observe about the methods. For
> various reasons, I have been scouring the studio education literature in
> design. There are many articles that almost always have a flashy title such
> as "a new approach to studio education in x", but exceptions
> notwithstanding, an overwhelming majority of these so-called validations
> are based on personal/anecdotal evidence (i.e. studio teachers finding
> their own performance wonderful, go figure). It is much harder in a
> commercial setting, but it is a little bit easier to test what works (or
> does not work) in classrooms. Education researchers do these types of
> analyses all the time with controlled experiments in classrooms, that is,
> do a random assignment (or use a sampling strategy), try your "new" method
> in one group, do nothing "special" in another group, compare the end
> results statistically. Some people would argue that "measuring" something
> is notoriously difficult in design education, but I would say that
> measuring something in any area is notoriously difficult, but that does not
> keep folks from trying. In short, I believe that we need long winded
> research programs to test the myths of studio education. Maybe our methods
> are really working, but till I have some evidence, as you said, I will
> remain a skeptic.
>
> Warm wishes,
>
> Ali O. Ilhan,PhD
> OzU/Istanbul Institute of Design
> www.ozu-iid.com
> www.ozyegin.edu.tr
>
>
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