DDR4 20th March 2004: QUESTION 2

AR (Panel Chair)
New question.

Cherie Lebbon. (Audience Questioner 2)
I used to be a Research Fellow at the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre, (RCA) and I am very involved with ‘inclusive design’ . I am out now out working as a researcher and practitioner. I am really interested in the cusp between research and design. My Question is:

QUESTION 2: “How do we define and clarify the distinction between practice and research, and when is practice research, especially for design practice?"

HF
I go back to what Christopher (Frayling) wrote in his introduction. He defines research as simply as meaning “An enquiry whose goal is new and communicable knowledge”. I hope that everyone can agree with that as a definition of research.

I think practice is not always new. There is a notion that it can be repetitive. It might be refining certain things that exist already, or reinterpreting things that exist already. Then there is the notion of invention in design practice. So we move across to what is obviously a grey area into something we might define as research.

MP
I would agree with that same perspective. There is practice in research, and there research in practice. And practice is research when it advances knowledge. That is true in design as it is in many other disciplines. It is true in medicine. It is true in engineering. It is true in architecture and I think design is no different from any other academic discipline, but practice is the domain within which much of the knowledge is generated.

FP
I think the whole process of designing is an analytical process and therefore it is actually a research process in itself. I find it very difficult to distinguish research from actually practice, unless one is going down the route that it is an academic exercise, or an intellectual exercise in researching into design practices and methodology. But from the day to day experience of working in design one is researching continually. The outcomes are different but nevertheless it is a research process.

DD
I think I should invite Nigel (Cross) to say a few things on this as he has gone on record of saying a number of things about this that are unpopular with certain parts of the art and design community. I don’t hold with the notion that all practice is research.

There are certain obviously research components in practice. I think practice as research can only be justified where it has a systematic motive for being research. That it would derive knowledge that is generalisable and communicable to other people. Some practice has this, quite a lot does not.

jcj
When I came into the meeting this afternoon, somebody said ‘which badge do you want’? One for research and one for practice. I could not make up my mind because I think they should be connected. And I think that is the main point I feel and I have always felt that. That if we make a distinction between them then it is perpetuating the dualism behind what seems to be, to me at least, and many others I think, to be wrong with industrial society and industrial products.

AR (Panel Chair) Intervenes for information.
I would just like to explain what the badges are. The red one is your dinner ticket. So don’t throw that one away! The option was ‘Do you consider yourself a research practitioner, with the green, or a design practitioner with the yellow?”. You did not have to choose one or the other, you could have both. It was an exercise to see whether most would put both, or whether some would just put one or the other, and to see what kind of complexion we had in the day.

jcj
I will go back to the colours. The meaning of those two colours – green and yellow, green was research, and yellow was practice. Well traditional meaning of those colours is - I heard the American Indians take green to mean the colour for overcoming difficulties, and yellow is in many quarters, and it is in my mind, the colour of intellect and thinking. I use it so on my website occasionally to colour the letters of certain words. Now if you look at those colours coincidentally it seems to put each into reverse – it seems to make practice to do with thinking , and research to do with overcoming problems . I like that crossing the dualism out. I should reply to Nigel’s point I think, which I did not have an opportunity to do just then.

Of course research done academically is done by people. I was wrong to suggest it wasn’t, and something inhuman in knowledge itself. But I think design research seems to be something to help improve the world, as design is meant to improve the world – to make it better, more profitable, or easy to use , or more glamorous, or nicer looking or something . It seems to me that both design and design research should share the same aims in that sense.

DO
Well it is cyclical. That is my answer to all this. Two models that I use in my practice: the first is - four boxes all linked together – information collection, information awareness, option generation, implications identification. Then decision making. Go back to the top. Get the right team, get the right people. Then you just keep going through that process, and obviously depending on what you are doing, you have to go many times around that loop, or a few times round that loop.

And of course if you are researching into design methods itself, then….. first collect the information, then find out what it means, then look at it the different ways of doing it, then look at the implications of the different ways of doing it, and decide which way you are going to go forward and move on. And so that process just sort of cascades itself through either from the bottom up or top down depending on which way you are going into your knowledge into your awareness.

The second is just three simple words. Explore. Represent. Share. I think the process of researching is one of exploration and you represent that process in certain ways, and then share that information. Some people do a lot of exploration but don’t do much of sharing. That goes back to the first question.

Those three - representation process and how you represent things are very important. But we can obviously research design methods themselves, and then that becomes the practice of researching into design methods.

Steve Hoffman. Designer (audience)
While you were discussing the semantics of what research might mean, or practice, I was reminded of my experience was in education. I had a Welsh bricklayer training to be a designer and he enthused me with design, and he said to me ‘all design is curiosity'. I am not saying that only applies to design, but I have never forgotten that. And for me I can't make a distinguish between practice and research. There is not one.

What my concern is.... that in an academic world, in an academic institution, they are dependent on brownie points to get their credibility. Research has become an act in itself. And as a practitioner and a researcher I can’t see the distinction. And as a practitioner my concern is that, although I understand the reason you are having this discussion, you could get hung up with the semantics of it and I think there are bigger issues there.

My experience of having taught in education, and knowing the culture of students, is that they are no longer curious about the world. I remember this Welsh bricklayer’s words so clearly. Design should be the act of being curious about the way we are. And the practice is getting better about being curious, and design is just a way of articulating it.

I feel really frustrated that if we get hung up on the semantics of it, and whose practicing and who is researching. It becomes a very inane conversation. (Some clapping)

Necdet Temur (audience)

This question of design and research, whether they complementary or, one is within the other etc. is almost like a vicious circle. Some years ago I thought about this and I developed two concepts. One is called ‘professional minimalism’, and the other is ‘epistemological maximalism’.

Professional Minimalism does not mean minimum or little. It means in the profession of design, or any design profession, people use the minimum necessary knowledge and information that is required for a particular job.

You can’t say. ‘Well I will go and do research, or do a master degree or whatever to do this job’. They don’t say that, they just use whatever is necessary. So I call it minimalism. It doesn’t mean little.

Now epistemological maximalism means that for research and science there is no maximum. There is no end. There is not an end to knowledge. So a researcher does not say ‘Now I reach the end of knowledge. Now I know everything to know there is to know about this particular subject.

This is why design professions and disciplines within universities have difficulty because in traditional university disciplines , a researcher doesn’t say I have now discovered all the secrets of the universe. They try and they do their best to produce new knowledge.

Whereas in design education and the design disciplines, we only use minimum necessary knowledge, and not maximum knowledge, because we don’t have time to do the maximum knowledge. So this is really the dilemma.

AR (Panel Chair)
Another comment.

Tim Coward. (audience)
My name is Tim Coward. My comment follows on from that, and I would like it to relate to Christopher’s (Frayling) definition, and particularly the word 'communicable'.

I think if you look at design as practiced outside academe, there is very little incentive and very little opportunity for the results of any research, which is engaged as part of that practice to be communicated because of the agencies of client interest, fee structure, of time, of structures of commercial practice.

It does seem curious to me that there has been only one major department inside a University which has mixed practice and research. You can see analogies in other disciplines, particularly medicine, which has been mentioned, where medical research and medical practice go on in the same institution, and maybe that this is an area that we should look at again.

John Wood. Goldsmiths College University of London (audience)
I think it is important to have a kind of sophistry around the meaning of these words, and I think we should look at what Chris (Jones) did and seek an underlying basis for this. And for me we should recognise that we live in a very individualistic, puritanical - still, bureaucratic, yes dualistic mindset. And perhaps the key idea here is ‘ethics’ because if we take a eudemonic approach, where we are looking for the ‘good’. I think the Greeks had a great idea because they did not really differentiate between products and habits and actions, and I think we should remind ourselves we can do the same. We do not have to get caught up in these university games. If we simply look for the outcome and see if it is good, and of course we have to agree it is good, and that’s the fun. And should not worry too much about which bits are research, and which bits are design.

Naomi Gornick. University of Dundee (audience)
I would like to pick up again from time to time on the point again of design students being curious. Because I think they are curious, as they would not be design students if they were not. I think they may be nervous these days, partly because of aspects John has just been describing. I would like to pick up on idea of 'explore, represent and share', and students’ activity.

Students’ ability to represent is not encouraged while they are at design school, and representing means not only design activity – it means writing, it means speaking verbally - putting an argument for what you are trying to do. Although there is great emphasis on their creativity in terms of visual aspects, not enough is done for them at that stage in helping them to speak properly and prepare coherent arguments for an audience, which is a non-design audience..

AR (Panel Chair)
Back to Cherie Lebbon for a final comment.

Cherie Lebbon (audience Questioner 2)
Thank you very much for providing answers to the Question. I did write it with a mind to stimulate the debate.

AR (Panel Chair)
I will make one comment on the difference between ‘research’ and ‘design’. It is perhaps seen in the ‘Aim’ of a project.

If the aim is to make the business of a commercial client successful, it most probably lies in the area of design practice. If the aim is to advance the knowledge of the discipline, and literally stated in some way, then it is likely to lie in the domain of design research.

The grey area is where a practitioner unwittingly advances the knowledge of the discipline by commercial practice in a quick and hidden way. So there is that area of difficulty. And I think it has been referred to by others, where in designing you might be doing something new but you need to communicate it . So taking a bit of a liberty here at this moment, it is the Aim in my view that is a key signifier of whether something is design practice or design research.

OK. We will move on to another question. This is from Rosan Chow.

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