Love Design and Research

It's common to hear and read references to research being about 'having a good research question'. Very little design research is actually of this form. What I see, however, is an awful lot of researchers and research students trying to force their research to fit. The results are seen in common problems during the research and in writing it up.

One of the markers of the history of the design field has been weakness in clear conceptual thinking about design activities. Rather than do the hard work of thinking things through carefully in theorising about design activities, designers and design researchers have tended to take short cuts. One of the most common approaches has been to invent meaningless 'concepts' to attempt to paper over the cracks of weak reasoning. The result has been a mess of unsound conceptual discussions

Some design researchers seem to have difficulty identifying relevant research publications. I was recently asked by a Swiss design researcher and colleagues for research references about info on design creativity and case studies of designers behaviour. Here is a list of 253 references.

I'm often asked how best to use Google as part of PhD research.

There is a fair bit of skill and process to doing Google searches effectively. The following process works pretty well and typically gets hundreds more references than postgraduate students' initial searches. The process is fast, effective and produces a review of information in which the review itself is subject to review and critique.  I developed the approach  in the late 90s based on Bastick's (1976) review of intuition and

Prof Ken Friedman has just released an electronic version of the Fluxus Reader. Fluxus was a cutting edge 'international network of artists, composers and designers' in the 1960s (Wikipedia). Ken was a member of Fluxus.

The hard copy Fluxus reader went out of print many years ago and copies sell for hundreds of dollars.

Owning the copyright to the Fluxus Reader, Ken has generously made an electronic copy available free through the University of Swinburne at http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/42234