“Walking Together- The Need for a Common Path for Designers and Researchers” in “Walking Together”
Walking Together: The Need for a Common Path for Designers and Researchers
Carole Despres
Bridging the gap between research and design is no new topic to EDRA members. Indeed, finding ways to help designers make better decisions based on research knowledge has been at the heart of the environmental design movement since its very beginning 50 years ago. Early collaborations between architects and environmental psychologists have led to several useful concepts, several of which are still taught in planning/architecture/design schools, sometimes without a full consciousness of who advanced them in the first place. Several Master/ PhD programs on people-environment relations were born out of this effort to humanize the built environment. Graduates from those programs have been teaching for several decades. The built environment as a variable influencing people’s behaviors and wellbeing has also received growing attention over the years, a significant amount of research being conducted in health-related fields. The use of scientific evidence to inform design has gradually made its way in both public and private sectors, mostly in the context of institutional buildings. Meta-reviews, systematic reviews and literature search are being conducted on different topics to gather strong evidence, and designers are asked to include it in their knowledge base to inform their decisions. Websites of Center for Health design, of InformeDesign are digital platforms providing this type of evidence. Why this title then? Doesn't the above suggest that designers and researchers are now working together? The argument made in the second half of the presentation will show that there is still much to do to optimize the usefulness of research knowledge for designers. A first demonstration shows that the modes of knowledge productions and the types of evidence considered in literature reviews often leave aside empirical evidence that would be most useful to designers. Beyond generalizable knowledge (quantitative), transferable knowledge (qualitative) needs to be considered. The design process is anchored in local reality (territory and culture) and its result is not a generic solution but a custom-made one. Moreover, the replication of some literature reviews show that if the texts selection is rigorous, the report on the findings is less so and leaves room for interpretation. A second demonstration illustrates the lack of true interdisciplinary teams in quantitative research, composed at once of design trained researchers and of scientists in other disciplines. This situation lead to the production of scientific evidence not always usable by designers. For evidence to be useful to designers, the focus should not only be on knowledge transfer but on knowledge production. Two on-going research projects in Quebec, Canada are used to illustrate these affirmations: one on “schools and healthy lifestyles” and the other on “late life housing choice”. Suggestions to increase the involvement of design-trained researchers in producing evidence is made in conclusion. It is suggested that concerned university curricula be transformed in ways to bring designers and scientists closer. Other avenues are to develop students’ capacity to work and understand each other from the beginning of their trainings, expanding the teaching of E-B research to other disciplines, and of research methods to undergraduate designers.
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