Navimation Research

Problematising theorising

In the last week I have attended a workshop with Mieke Bal as well as a seminar on ‘research by design’. It has been a strange but interesting experience. The events presented me with two different approaches to theorising in practice-based research.

Mieke Bal talked about the case study. In her opinion, a case can be anything, including design experiments produced by the researcher. If I remember correctly, she described the case study as a “tool for polemics”, that is, a tool for critical theorising. Implicitly, theorising is the unquestionable goal of this process.

In the ‘research by design’ seminar, Chris Rust presented a different view. His advice is to avoid an excess of theorising. He referred to problems in the social sciences of developing grand theories that are not connected to reality. We should pay attention to theory, but not let the polemic take over “when there is work to do”, as he formulated it. I am not sure what kind of work he was referring to.

I guess the need for theorizing will depend on the specific research question, and research field. If the problem one tries to solve is “practical”, then it might not be necessary to develop much theory to solve it. However, a conceptual problem needs theory to be solved. And as far as I have understood, academic research (including a scholarly based PhD) requires a high degree of reflection or theorizing. Therefore, a regular design problem does not qualify as an academic research problem.

Then the remaining question is: how to find the balance between theorising and not creating a polemical monster disconnected from reality?

Seminar: Research by design

The Research by Design seminar was arranged yesterday as part of the PhD school at AHO. It was a rather long day of presentations, more or less relevant to my project. The image below is from the last presentation, many had left at this point.

Chris Rust (webpage) presented A Hopeful Marriage: Artistic Inguiry in the Academy 1993-2008, and shared experiences from the UK on practice-based research. Some key points: good research practice is the one important criteria, avoid excess of theorizing, don’t create a monster, build theory through practice, own your research and argue for it, a thesis must be visible and permanent, research should be a single inquiry.

Timo Arnall & Einar Sneve Martinussen presented Touch: Designing an Internet of Things, and gave a general overview of the Touch project at AHO, described through a series of themes.

Birger Sevaldson was Being Specific about Practice Based Research in Design: An Attempt at Mapping the Field, and is in the process of mapping the field of Practice Based Research. A difficult but important task.

Michael Weinstock gave a presentation on Forms and Process in Nature and Civilisation, and showed how we can understand the emergence of cities, civilisation and information systems by looking at processes of metabolism and evolution in nature.

Michael Hensel is Constructing a Research Programme: Performance-Oriented Design along a Biological Paradigm. He is investigating the possibility of going from a function-oriented architecture to a new paradigm inspired by biology, where performativity is a key issue.

Mick Eekhout presented an example of Designing and Prototyping of a New Generation of Composite Sandwich Structures for Free Form Architecture. We got to see how technological research may be carried out in real world projects.

Børre Skodvin (Jensen & Skodvin) gave insights From Architectural Practice, on the relationship between practice and research seen from a practitioner.

Pattie Bell Hastings (webpage) presented The Misuse Manifesto, related to her artistic work in progress, with ideas related to technology and mobile misuse.

The seminar was a bit long, and except of Chris Rust and Birger Sevaldson’s presentations, there were few attempts to discuss and problematize the concepts and practices of ‘research by design’. We saw many examples that were interesting in themselves, but without being placed in a theoretical context it is hard to see how they help us to develop better theories or practices of ‘research by design’.

Tags: AHO, design, research, research by design, seminar