This page is a part of Jan Michl's website
The following text is a polemical review
of a recent Danish publication about design research
Designforskning: en international oversigt by Thomas Dickson.
published by Arkitektskolens Forlag, Aarhus [Denmark], 2002, 205 pp.
The review is forthcoming in Scandinavian Journal of Design History 14 2004.
[The language not yet checked by a native speaker]
Reviewed by
Jan Michl
You are in for a disappointment if you happen to believe that this book (whose title in English would be Design Research: An International Overview) is about the content of design research - that it provides an outline of foreign design research in the sense of presenting and discussing the most common positions and disagreements, various types of problem formulations, new insights and fresh approaches, and that it offers reference to the most remarkable and most discussed books and articles written by the most interesting researchers active today. Contrary to its auspicious but largely misleading title, the publication refers only marginally to design research content. It is mainly, and loosely, about what can be called design research frameworks, in Denmark and six other countries; and seems to be addressed above all to the Danish design research administrators and planners. But if you hope to locate for example a chapter (or a subchapter or a paragraph) discussing doctoral education in design research or listing current design-related doctoral programs - a key element of any research framework - you will be disappointed too as such a theme is nowhere to find. The overview is international but only if one is willing to accept that the term international stands mainly for the Great Britain and USA plus other Scandinavian countries in addition to Denmark, and that it leaves out most of Europe. The publication deserves to be called a book largely because it is a well designed and well printed product, not because it is a publication consciously addressing the public sphere. So in spite of its rather pleasant exterior, it is more of an in-house report replete with characteristic report idiosyncrasies. In addition to giving the material a visually satisfying appearance the only other effort expended on turning the report into a full-fledged book consisted, it appears, in giving it its inflated title. Had the report been distributed under a matter-of-factly name to relevant research institutions and libraries in Denmark and Scandinavia, preferably free of charge (it was after all the taxpayers’ money that financed the project) plus made accessible online, instead of selling it for a price under an enticing label in regular bookshops, the balance between what it appears to promise and what it in fact delivers would have been better.
But even though the publication turns out not to be quite what its title promises, it does provide a useful general overview of current design research scene in the selected countries, and supplies interesting information and some good overall characteristics of the design research status of the discussed countries. It is as a state-of-the-art report that the publication is valuable. The information it provides is according to the author based on his exploration of recent design research literature, on his mostly personal visits to, and descriptions of, some 40 different institutions in Europe and USA which practice design research in one form or another, and on a great number of questionnaire-based responses from individual researchers.
The publication has three distinct sections. In the first the author describes various design research environments in different countries, starting with Denmark, and going on to include other Scandinavian countries, the Great Britain and USA, plus fractions of Italian and Dutch research scene. The presentation has a form of short reviews of various institutions engaged in design research. All this is put forward as a kind of verbal travelogue, with concise summaries characterizing the design research status of the country in question. The third section of the report, referred to by the author as interviews, is assigned to the report’s Appendix and makes up full half of the publication (i. e. some 100 pages). It consists of replies given by 38 design researchers or administrators in various countries to a 26-point questionnaire. Sandwiched between institutional descriptions and questionnaire answers is the report’s middle, theoretical section of some 25 pages, divided into three chapters devoted to discussing design definitions, and various aspects of the nature, and future, of design research.
The report is an end result of a project developed by the Danish Center for Intergreret Design (CID) about the state of design research in Denmark and abroad. According to the report's introduction the Center itself was established in 1999 for a three year period, as a consequence of the Danish governmental design initiative, and with a budget of DKR 8.1 million, as one of three extramural research centres with the total budget of DKR 15 million. It was based on cooperation between Arkitektskolen i Aarhus and Aalborg Universitet (no further specification of what the cooperation entailed is given). There is a repeated reference to a description of the project of which the present publication is the result, but the description, interesting as it would be for the reader, is not included in the report. The language of the report is Danish, apart from a short concluding English summary. As a whole it is a one-man product: the entire project was conduced and written by Thomas Dickson (*1958), who describes himself as industrial designer graduated from Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole, with product design, design promotion and design teaching practice, and whom the book in addition presents as design and architecture magazine editor, and as a senior researcher at the CID. Mr. Dickson editorial experience does show: he writes well and in a reader-friendly manner, taking commendable care to avoid specialist cant. The content of the report is informative, and has a clear and meaningful structure, and the reader does get a fairly good feel of what is happening nowadays around design research in the selected places (all these are furnished with web addresses). On the whole, however, the report is marred by various problems, some rather serious. Several of these are related the report-like character of the publication. Other relate to research standards. The principal problem has to do with what I perceive as the main bearing of the middle section of the publication, namely its rather obsessive preoccupation with the proper definition of design. This preoccupation is, I believe, ill-conceived as it promotes a discipline dependent, and ultimately bureaucratic, understanding of design research, while ignoring the true driving forces behind all good research, namely wonder, curiosity, and eagerness to better understand reality.
The publication starts the way internal reports tend to start: in medias res. It opens with the discussion of recent governmental design policies, and design research initiatives. This is a reasonable thing to do as the initial impulse, and money, for this project, came from the government. Unfortunately, this is all the reader gets by way of introduction: after a short stop in order to comment on his methods of inquiry, the author goes straight to the results of his research about design research environments (“designforskningsmiljøer”), first in Denmark and then the other countries. There is no introductory paragraph explaining, or at least suggesting, why, in the eyes of the author, this thing called design is at all important. No introductory explanation of why he considers design research so vital. Not even a sentence referring to the history of design profession, nothing about what the term design stands for in English and how it is used, not a single remark commenting on the fact that the term design, ubiquitous in his Danish text, is in fact an English word imported to Danish (and other European languages) only some 50 years ago. The historical scope of the publication (excepting a couple of questionnaire responses) is extraordinarily shallow - approximately 10-15 years: whatever lies beyond 1990s is beyond the author’s attention. As a result the author’s discussions of design hover in a strangely timeless, historyless limbo. Are we to understand this as a telltale sign that practicing designers still have difficult time understanding that all design research, as well as all design practice, has an intrinsic historical dimension - or are we to see it only as an indication that there was not enough space, and time, for explicitly introducing this dimension into the report? At any rate, the author’s failure to even remind the reader of the historical dimension of design (in whatever sense of the term) may be tolerable in an internal report but less so in a public book. The same can be said about the author’s decision to leave out from the overview such important European countries as Germany or France. Since English is the second language of virtually every educated Dane (as well as the rest of Scandinavians) while command of both German and French is in general far less widespread, the result is that the information about what happens in Germany and France - compared with our knowledge of the design world of the English speaking countries - is on the whole highly inadequate. To say, as the report does, that design research in France or Germany (or other absent countries) is too fragmented to obtain a synoptic view or that these countries’ researchers only seldom participate in the large international conferences with papers of their own is simply not quite persuasive a reason for leaving such countries out in a publication advertised as an international overview. True, no report can cover everything. But had the report been called something like Design research frameworks in Denmark, Scandinavia, the Great Britain and the USA the title would have been admittedly less grand but also less misinforming the reader.
While these problems are in principle related to the report-like character of the publication, other kinds of problems seem to disclose an odd negligence of established research standards. First about the book’s bibliography and then about the status of the questionnaire answers in the interview section.
The minimal attention devoted to the research bibliography is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the whole publication. Among the 26 written questions submitted to every of the 38 respondents, question no.16 asked explicitly for a list of five recent publications. This was an excellent idea. However, only three out of the 38 respondents complied, although most of them did mention, without specifying, that they, or members of the institution they represented, had published both books and articles. Incomprehensibly, the author let the respondents get away with not providing him with the list of the five publications he asked for. Here he could have assembled perhaps up to 150 fresh research references, which would give a real depth to the publication - but he ended up with some 15 titles, which, furthermore, remain buried somewhere in the interview texts. Was the author unaware that an extensive research bibliography would have constituted a central asset of the publication? The author did compile a bibliography at the end of the report numbering some 40 items but this includes more or less well known books the author obviously used to orient himself in the design research landscape - while the 15 new research references acquired through the questionnaire are not listed there.
Another problem, also related to the questionnaire section is the knowledge status of the questionnaire answers. To put it more concretely: to what extent are we to trust that the formulations we read are really those the respondents stand for. The author says in his introduction, that he chose a “journalist approach” (7) to his research presentation both in the first and last section of the report. This did not create any problem in the first section, but it became a liability in the last, questionnaire section. The problem is the precision level. In contrast to journalists we expect researchers at all times to inform the reader about the sources and status of the knowledge they communicate. Here the author simply leaves us in the dark. The only hint the reader receives are two rather uninformative introductory sentences: “Most of the interviews were conducted in person at the institution in question. In some cases the questionnaire was answered in writing after a previous conversation.” (15) But how were the interviews conducted in person carried out? Did the respondents simply read and answered the questionnaire, while the author recorded the answers? Is this what he means by “interviews” or did he meant something more interactive? And how were the answers recorded? Were they perhaps taken down in shorthand? Were they taped and transcribed word for word? Are the answers we read reconstructed from the author’s hand-written notes taken during the interviews? Were the Danish questionnaire answers authorized by the respondents? The author does not tell. Some interviews are introduced by the note “Visit [& date]” while others are introduced by “Conversation [& date]”. Are the terms “Visit” and “Conversation” interchangeable, or is there perhaps a reason why the author sometime uses the first and sometime the second term? He does not say. Other interviews are introduced by statements such as “Questions answered in writing after a previous conversation [& date]”. Does this mean that the texts we read are simply verbatim transcriptions of the respondents’ very own texts? If so, why does the author find it necessary to inform us about the previous conversation? Is this a working note which made sense while he conducted the interviews but which he forgot to delete in the final text? All this vagueness seriously depreciates the research value of the published answers. Just as it is not advisable to quote from, or argue with, a newspaper or magazine interview, unless it is explicitly stated that the interview formulations were authorized by the interviewee, a prudent researcher would avoid quoting from the present report’s questionnaire answers in the absence of the author’s clarification of their status as evidence. This is a great pity given the huge amount of time obviously invested into collecting the questionnaire answers.
Lastly I want to comment on the publication’s preoccupation, in the middle, theoretical section of the report, as well in the last, questionnaire section, with the definition of design and the definition of design research, i.e. with the alleged “cores” of these two activities. (Admittedly, many other things are discussed in the middle section apart from the definition problem, but the definition question still seems to be the section’s dominant concern; at any rate I see it as the report’s most dubious urge.) Although I do believe there is a sensible aspect to this preoccupation (we'd better know what we are talking about when we use the word design) I am afraid that on the whole the definition discussions are deeply misguided. The main problem, as I see it, is that the discussions all the time link up the idea of research with the idea of a discipline, so much so that the two tend to merge. However, since a discipline is an organizational and administrative category, while the heart of research is the effort to understand our world better in order to fool ourselves less, the whole idea of research is converted almost entirely into organizational and administrative terms.
The author's nr. 1 question in his questionnaire is: “How do you define design?” The problem with this seemingly reasonable question is that it is heavily loaded: it is a question and a declaration rolled into one. The author’s question actually says: “There is of course only one proper, right and objectively valid meaning of the word design and it is this proper meaning we are in search of. Now, what is this proper meaning according to you?” In other words, the question makes the respondent take for granted an apriori claim that there in fact is such a thing as one proper, right and objectively valid meaning to the word design - without giving the respondent a chance to reject the claim, because the claim is not obvious in the question. Having accepted the question as legitimate, the respondent is caged: practically any answer of his will sound like a confirmation of the idea that there really is only one proper meaning of the term design. (The author in fact reports that some respondents tended to shudder at the question. I do not blame them.) However, hardly any of the respondents attempted to break out of the cage this question put him into. Without protest almost all of them proceeded meekly to answer it - instead of responding in the only way which would set the respondent free again - namely by posing a counter-question, such as: “How do I define design. Well, what sense of the word design do you have in mind?” For it is an undisputed fact (one that the author himself widely comments upon) that the word design stands for very many very different things. It is exactly this fact, that the counter-question takes into account.
The report's preoccupation with the definition question must then be taken as an expression of unwillingness to take the multitude of meanings of the word design for the reality it is. Mr. Dickson obviously sees this plurality of meanings as a deplorable case of “confusion” (as he puts it; 66, 69), i.e. as a kind of falling from grace of some sort of primordial oneness of Design. The counter-question “What sense of the word design do you have in mind?” shows I think that the author’s definition question makes no sense unless one has embraced a metaphysical belief such as, let’s say, that once upon a time the term design came with a manual, which we unfortunately misplaced, but which, damn it, must be somewhere, and the task now is to find the manual, or at least a person who still remembers what it was the manual said. Only this kind of an essentialist dream can explain the author’s suggestions informing the middle section of the report, that without the true definition of design it would be difficult, or perhaps even impossible, to practice design research proper.
The author’s nr. 2 question of the questionnaire, “How do you define design research?”, is hit by the same objection as his nr. 1. Neither this question makes much sense without your acceptance of the above mentioned essentialist design metaphysics rolled into the question. Also here the question can be effectively disposed of by the respondent’s counter-question: “What sense of the word design do you have in mind when you speak about design research?” For no piece of design research is ever about design as such (whatever that may mean), nor can it be: it is always about this or that concrete problem, related to this or that particular meaning or aspect of the term design. This is in fact the very first thing design research students are taught: to focus their project on one well defined problem.
It seems that the intention behind the report’s preoccupation with unearthing an objective design definition and finding an objective core of design research is ultimately connected to the effort to reinforce the identity and status of the profession. The author puts in a nut-shell when he writes: ”It is a task for the practicing researchers to discover the core of design research [finde ind til kernen i designforskningen] as well as the frontiers of their professional field in order to be able to establish a better and more conscious cooperation between other specialist research disciplines” (84) The quotation suggests that only when a unique core of design research is discovered can one proceed to legitimately claim a piece of design land of one's own - and raise fences distinguishing what is ours from what is theirs, so to speak. Only in this way, so the logic seems to go, can designers claim that they truly differ from engineers, architects, ergonomists, cognitive psychologists, marketing people and other professions perceived as competitors. Of course, the more or less hidden inter-professional struggles going on among neighbouring professions for a place in the sun are all too real. But should design research aim at propping up the organizational status of the profession? Will the result be research about design - or rather design promotion? At any rate, the report's insistence on associating research with notions such as bordes, limits and frontiers (this is our research turf - that is your research turf) is very disturbing now when design research is still in its infancy. We can be pretty sure, that the one true design definition and the one true of core of design research which the report urges be uncovered will be never found because the whole quest is foolish. But the very idea that such a quest is important will linger on and will be certainly used to pester young researchers to toe the line whenever their chosen problems transcend the turf.
That this report tends to embrace amost eclusively an organizational, administrative and ultimately bureaucratic perspective on design research is, I presume, an unintended result of the governmental research initiatives. It is a well known fact that not very many among practicing designers read design literature or are interested in design theories. Designers, busy as they are, are inclined just as the rest of us to fall back on what we've learned at school rather than to question it. In general, design schools by their very nature tend to perpetuate the status quo. Left to their own devices, neither designers nor design teachers would then probably produce very much research. The report discussions confirm that. After all, designers are first and foremost trained to design new things, or, when acting as teachers, to instruct students in ways of designing things. They are not primarily interested, nor trained, to produce new theoretical insights. Nevertheless, it can be probably expected that to develop a discourse and a research culture around that cluster of different things called design, would in the long run help both designers and design pedagogues to do a better job. Commercial research funding tends to keep research securely in pragmatic channels. The government research initiatives on the other hand, devised to promote research at state owned design schools, have created a system of external pressures (research dependent pedagogical titles and research dependent tenures) that tend to create a perception that the ultimate meaning of research is to keep government departments happy. Like the Soviet planned economy of the past, also the government initiated research pressures may tend towards “conspicuous production." (1) This report may illustrate the point: By all administrative standards it is an excellent result. It was concluded in time, it has collected quite a lot of information, it has discussed problems, its results were made accessible in a book form, the publishers even succeeded in recovering some of its production costs through its sales; the CID did what its project promised, and the department can consider the initiative a success. That the report seriously distorts the idea of research by presenting, albeit unwittingly, the organizational and administrative perspectives on design research as if these were the only possible, or the only important ones, is something the governmental departments in charge would probably be the last to notice.
In the situation where administrative and organizational notions of research tend to get the upper hand (seemingly as an unintended consequence of the fact that research impulse comes largely from outside the design profession and from outside the educational institutions, being enforced mainly from the top) it is imperative to find a perspective on research which would be able to counter these inherent dangers. Here I cannot think of any approach more suited to this task than the research philosophy developed by Karl Popper, the late British philosopher of Austrian origin. Popper, a great demystifier of science, claimed that science is not to be understood as a body of verified knowledge, as the general understanding has it, but as a body of theories, conjectures and hypotheses which are as yet not refuted. In his view all our knowledge is and always will be conjectural. He argued consequently that in stead of attempting to verify our theories we should try hard to find faults with them. A theory was in his view scientific if, and only if, it was possible to conceive of circumstances which would amount to its refutation. He did believe in growth of knowledge though, and saw the possibility of free criticism as the cardinal precondition of such growth. He claimed that neither philosophy nor science has any special method apart from the critical attitude. He argued that problems can only be solved with the help of new ideas, not through arguing about meaning of words. Popper reminded his students that they were not students of subject matters or disciplines but students of problems. Of course, research administrators have need for subject matters, and disciplines and for borders between them. But it should be remembered that such organizational and administrative categories are later by-products of earlier research activities (and not the other way round), and that the established disciplinary fields, more often than not, tend to limit the researcher’s freedom to pursue the chosen problems, as research problems, by their nature not only fail to respect the boundaries of disciplines, but invariably cut across these disciplines and traditional subject matters. (2)
The idea that there is an objective core of design research and that this core should belongs to designers only, should be seen for what it is: a flight of fancy. I do agree with the author’s conclusion, however, that there is a need to focus on what the report loosely describes as design process, i.e. a need for more insight into what designers as designers actually do and how they do it (and I see for my part that such a focus is important also in order to make design history more useful to design students). But this sensible focus must be seen as a matter of research choices, preferences, priorities and decisions - not something that constitutes a given, intrinsic, objective core of design research. Design research, I contend, has no core which exists independently of what a person or a group chooses to see as its core. To argue otherwise betrays a monopolist, protectionist impuls. And protectionism is bound to hinder the development towards a vibrant design research, because it will tend to allow only card carrying members of the profession into whatever will be described as the “core”. (The rather sullen and unappreciative remarks, found here and there in the report, regarding the present journal, the Copenhagen-published Scandinavian Journal of Design History, on account that it is allegedly concerned with only aesthetic and stylistic aspects of design, are fully comprehensible in the light of the above ideas. If there exists somewhere an inherent and therefore objectively valid definition of design research, it makes all design research, not covered by this definition, somewhat inferior (as if style and aesthetics were an illegitimate focus of design research). Only on this view can the journal’s considerable design research contribution - over a hundred research articles and some fifty design book reviews published in the past 13 years - be either almost ignored in the report or treated nearly as an act of trespassing. I presume that under more normal circumstances would the fact that Denmark has been publishing the only Scandinavian design research journal, and that it is one of five of six such journals worldwide, be a reason for a Danish design research report to rejoice.) The idea of an objective design research core endorsed by the report seems to entail that what matters in research is being a member of a profession rather that having theoretical, intellectual, scientific ideas about, insights into, and interest in what design is all about. Had the former been the case there would have been a booming design research for years. Among the scores of practicing designers there have been in the English speaking world some persons , such as David Pye, or Eva Zeisel, or Paula Scher or Koen de Winter, (3) who have made true contributions to better understanding of what designers do by reflecting about what they do themselves. But these designers are exception rather than rule, which suggests that the idea of finding and reserving a core of design to designers alone would hardly help.
We need to curb such monopolist urges. Instead of searching for an intrinsic core of design research to be set apart for practicing designers only, would it not be a much better idea to keep an open house? Why not invite anybody, from any discipline or profession whatsoever, who is interested in contributing to better understanding of any of the numerous meanings represented by the term design, and the problems related to these meanings? The present report documented persuasively that the number of various contents imputed to the term design is indeed great, and that it is a fact. Let that stand for the main finding of the report. Let us therefore awake from the bureaucratic dream of arriving at one correct definition of design and one correct definition of design research. Research is useful only if it helps us to distinguish between reality and wishful thinking.
(1) Michael Polanyi, "Towards a Theory of Conspicuous Production," Soviet Survey, no . 34, October-December (1960): 90-99: see also Paul Craig Roberts, Alienation and the Soviet Economy, Oakland, Ca.: The Independent Institute, 1990.
(2) Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Volume II: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath. 4th (revised) ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. See also Tomas Kulka, "Art and Science: An Outline of a Popperian Aesthetics." British Journal of Aesthetics 29, no. 3, Summer (1989): 197-212; Mark Amadeus Notturno, Science and the Open Society: The Future of Karl Popper's Philosophy. New York, N.Y.: Central European University Press, 2000; Steve Fuller, The Struggle for the Soul of Science: Kuhn vs. Popper. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2003.
(3) David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968; David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design. London: The Herbert Press, 1978; Eva Zeisel, "On Being a Designer." In Eva Zeisel: Designer for Industry, 73-104. Montréal: Le Château Dufresne, 1984; Paula Scher, Make It Bigger. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002; Koen De Winter, "Thoughts on Originality" designaddict, 2002, online at http://www.designaddict.com/essais/Originality.html.
Your critical views, as well as friendly comments, are most welcome: e-mail
You are also welcome
to create a link
to this page
Other online reviews in English by Jan Michl:
S. Väkevä, ed. (1990) Product Semantics '89
S. Vihma, ed. (1990) Semantic Visions in Design
P. Lloyd Jones (1991)
Taste Today: The Role of Appreciation in Consumerism and Design
G. Widengren, ed. (1994) Tanken och Handen: Konstfack 150 ĺr
M. Aav and N. Stritzler-Levine, eds. (1998)
Finnish Modern Design
All online articles IN ENGLISH by Jan Michl
To all of Jan Michl's online articles
Links to other websites with design related online texts
Workplace: Institutt for industridesign AHO , Oslo, Norway