- [Announcer] Peter Dalsgaard is talking about
experimental systems and research through design.
- Thank you.
I really want to thank the previous speakers.
This has been an awesome session so far.
And thanks to all of you for hanging in there
to hear me talk about a semi-obscure
German historian of science, you've been warned.
This is a note, so I'll have to kind of
go quickly through it and it also means
that I'm gonna cheat a bit.
I'm gonna start (mumbles) the conclusion
and the take aways and then hopefully,
I'll have time enough to make my way
back to the beginning of the talk.
In this note, I propose that looking to more
well-established academic disciplines
may help us articulate and develop research
through design as a research approach.
And I do this in a particular manner,
namely looking at the work of Hans-Jorg Rheinberger
and four of his core concepts.
And just to very briefly situate this work
I expect that many of you in this particular crowd
know about research through design,
but this is a research approach that employs
methods and processes from design practice
as a legitimate method of inquiry.
And this has emerged as a fairly prominent research approach
within the design-oriented communities within HCI.
Now last year at the Creativity and Cognition Conference,
one of the keynote speakers, Steven Scri-vin-nah
introduced me to the work of Hans-Jorg Rheinberger.
I had never heard of him before
and I think in part because
quite a bit of his work hasn't been
translated into English yet.
But I was intrigued by this keynote.
I started reading up on it and what really struck me
about his work was that,
even though he works within the field of molecular biology
and approaches it as a historian of science,
the way in which he describes
the epistemology of experimentation,
meaning the ways in which we generate new knowledge
and learn through experiments,
really resonated with the ways
in which we normally describe
experimentation in design research.
And the particular concept, the main concept
that I look at in this note
is Rheinberger's notion of experimental systems.
And he has a quite holistic understanding
of what an experimental system is.
He says, "It's the basic unit of experimental activity
and that it combines local, technical, instrumental,
institutional, social and epistemic aspects."
And really, experimental systems are crucial to the way
that we do research because any study begins
with the choice of the system.
Everything depends on this choice:
the range within which the experimenter can move,
the character of the questions he's able to ask
(mumbles) answers he can give.
I'm just going to stop for a short while
and clarify a few things for you and for (mumbles)
I am not suggesting that we should muddle research
through design on the natural sciences
or that we should adhere to their methodologies.
What I am suggesting is that looking at other articulations
of knowledge generations such as that of Rheinberger,
may help us understand and articulate research
through design in it's own right.
And I think there are good reasons why
we might want to do this because research through design
is still a nascent field
and there are number of central issues,
basic research issues,
that are still contested or underdeveloped.
But back to Rheinberger...
I'm going to briefly run through these four key concepts
and then begin to scratch the surface
of what it might mean if we look at research through design
through this lens.
Firstly experimental systems,
I briefly introduced it before,
these are systems of manipulation designed
to give unknown answers to questions
that the experiment system solves
and not yet able clearly to ask.
They're not simply experimental devices
that generate answers.
Experimental systems are vehicles
for materializing questions.
And when I read this I thought, this doesn't sound
like science in the way that I normally think about science.
Another thing that is quite interesting about this
when we start looking at research through design,
is that Rheinberger tells us that
these systems are composed of both epistemic things,
which are the things that we want to know more about
through our experiments
and technical things, which are the set ups
and things that allow us to study epistemic things.
If we look at research through design,
I think we might say that design projects
are probably the most prominent basic experimental system.
We often talk about wicked problems
and the co-evolution of problem and solution,
and this has been brought up in this session as well,
as a very particular and unique way of design research.
Something that makes it stand out
from other modes of inquiry.
But what Rheinberger says that this might actually be
a general characteristic of experimental research
in other domains as well.
Another thing that stands out
is that the designs or the prototypes and artifacts
that we built are often in some way conflated
with epistemic things.
They are the things we want to know more about.
So the generation of knowledge
and the generation of designs are often intertwined
in research through design.
This needn't always be a problem
but it can potentially be problematic
if the design and the epistemic things
start moving in different directions.
Or the design you built start moving away
from the question you really wanted to answer.
The second core concept
is that of differential reproduction.
Now well-functioning, experimental systems
must facilitate differential reproduction
and this means the continuous generation
of new and non-trivial knowledge
beyond what we could anticipate
when we started experimenting.
For this reason, Rheinberger also calls them
generators of surprises.
And I would argue that there are probably
quite few constructs in research through design
that enabled differential reproduction
over longer stretches of time.
Perhaps because most of our design projects
are actually finite in time.
But if I were to come up with a few proposals,
then maybe research programs could be one example of that.
For instance, Dunne and Raby's work on critical design
or (mumbles) work on tangible bits.
Or perhaps also really strong examples
such as the Diner book that continues to unfold
and help us generate new insights over the course of time.
A third central concept is that of graphemes.
Experimental systems strongly rely on
and at the same time generate graphemes.
Meaning representations, inscriptions,
documentation and material traces of knowledge.
And the important thing to note here is that
these are not just things we note down
as a form of documentation about what had happened.
These things actually frame the way we think about
the questions that
we might answer.
And also frames the types of answers that we give.
So he says that, "researchers think with these inscriptions
and within the boundaries of such spaces of representation."
This is another part of research through design
that might be underdeveloped at this point in time.
But there is a mounting interest in developing graphemes
that address both the processes
and the products of research through design
such as annotated portfolios, pictorials,
design process documentation and so on.
Another way of thinking about it
that I think would resonate with a lot of people in here
are the ways in which publication templates and formats
frame the way in which we pose questions
and how we seek to answer them.
The fourth and final concept
is that of experimental cultures.
Now experimental systems,
they evolve over the course of time.
They can become unstable by (mumbles)
and potentially if they become more stable,
turn into experimental cultures
or even research disciplines.
Looking at research through design,
I think we might describe it
as a predominately experimental culture
that may be maturing into a discipline.
Some cultures seem to be stabilizing
in the book on constructive design research.
For instance, they mention lab,
field and showroom as examples.
But they are ongoing negotiations and formulations
of basic questions for research.
Such as, what counts as a knowledge contribution?
I think we even had it in this session, this debate.
Which criteria these contributions
should be evaluated by?
Which modes of documentation
and representation are accepted?
So by that, I've made my way back
to the beginning, or the end.
What I propose in this note, just to reiterate,
is that I think it might help us in articulating
and developing research through design
if we look to more well-established paradigms
of knowledge generation.
And I've done that by examining
four concepts from Rheinberger.
Thank you.
(applause)
- [Audience Member] Hi, my name is (mumbles)
Thank you for the wonderful talk.
I was thinking about, does Rheinberger say
anything about tools?
Because from a designer perspective,
I think your tools are also things you think with, right?
- Yes. - Instead of the
representation that you produce?
- Yes.
I only mentioned this very briefly.
He talks about epistemic things and technical things.
And technical things would probably fall into
the category of tools.
But...
What is an epistemic thing and what is a technical thing
is not set in stone.
Things move between these two.
So at one point in time, we might be exploring something
that is an epistemic thing.
Something we don't know enough about.
We want to know more about it.
But as we get to know more about it,
it can become a tool and become an epistemic thing
that then allows us to explore something else.
Thank you.
(applause)