Joe Deal

Provost, Rhode Island School of Design

Using the Tools and Language of our Disciplines:
Some Examples of Basic and Applied Research in Art and Design in the U.S.

Sensuous Knowledge Conference, a Conference on Research and Development in Art and Design, Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway, October 26 – 28, 2004

The questions being asked at this conference about the nature of research in the fields of art and design, which also have direct implications on what degrees should be offered in our fields, have not been as hotly debated during the past several years in the United States as they have been in other parts of the world, particularly in Europe and Australia where the Ph.D. degree in art is gaining greater and greater foothold. There are several reasons for that.

First, I think, is the fact that in the United States the Master of Fine Arts degree is regarded within the profession and by most colleges and universities as a terminal degree, or the highest degree one can attain, and that it is therefore the equivalent of the Ph.D. for the purpose of appointment to faculty rank at any university in the country. This has been true at least since 1959, when the College Art Association, the oldest and largest professional society in the United States concerned with teaching and research in the studio arts and art history, declared it to be equivalent to the Ph.D. Of the College Art Association’s more than 13,000 members, nearly 6,000 hold the MFA degree. Two years ago, the College Art Association went even further when it stated, “No academic degree other than the M.F.A. or equivalent professional achievement should be regarded as qualification for appointment to professional rank, promotion, or tenure [in studio art disciplines].” As a consequence, most colleges and universities in the United States that have degree programs in art and design accept the creative activity of faculty artists and designers as equal to the scholarship or research of faculty members in the humanities and the sciences. Furthermore, faculty artists and designers are held to the same standard of performance for their professional, creative work as researchers and scholars in other fields. That has meant, of course, that faculty artists and designers teaching in the United States already consider their creative work to be research, at least in academic parlance, and that there is no real incentive to change either the nature of their work or the name of the degree for the sake of appointment or promotion. At the institution where I work, professional activity, whether it takes the form of scholarship, research, or creative work, can be as much as 40% of a faculty member’s responsibilities, and all faculties are held to the same high standard for their research. They are expected to be professionally active and it is expected that their professional work make a contribution to their discipline.

Another reason why the Ph.D. and the nature of research in art and design has not been a hot topic in the United States, at least until recently is that there has been no real financial 2 incentive to elevate research beyond what I’ve already described or to hold a doctoral degree in order to qualify for research funding, either. There is no equivalent in the United States to the Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom or to any other system of measuring research output for all disciplines using the same scale. There simply has been no funding for creative work that compares even closely to the research funding that is available in the sciences. The National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health, two federal funding agencies in the U.S., give out billions of dollars each year for research. Their counterpart, the National Endowment for the Arts, stopped making grants to individual artists several years ago. But, even when they did, the amounts were tiny and limited to a fraction of the number of those awarded to faculty members in science and medicine. There are no cultural ministries, or ministries of education, as those that exist in many European countries to support education in the arts. And there is not a single funding agency in the U.S. of which I am aware, public or private, that would fund research in art and design under the condition that the recipient holds a doctoral degree, and I don’t expect that situation to change.

I’m not saying, however, that there has not been a significant increase in recent years in extending the nature of the work in our disciplines in directions that might be called research. This was brought about, in part, by the dominance of the research university in the landscape of higher education since World War II in the United States and to the changing culture of research as a result at most other colleges and universities — a time, coincidentally, that graduate programs in the arts began to emerge that soon led to the establishment of the Master of Fine Arts degree. Since the late 1940’s, the term “research” has all but replaced “scholarship,” and you won’t find the term design or studio practice in the language of most university tenure and promotion policies, either. They are all subsumed under the term “research.” Not only do many humanities scholars now refer to their work as “research,” so do many faculty artists. In some ways, this is liberating. What it has meant is that those of us who teach art and design have been free to define research, scholarship, or creative activity – whatever you choose to call it – using the tools and language of our disciplines and have not had to force our artistic practice into the research molds of other disciplines. In other words, it’s our productivity as artists and designers that matters, not whether or not we write and publish papers.

This situation may be changing. Nearly two years ago, a committee of the College Art Association published a position paper that argued that the MFA is not the equivalent to the Ph.D. They pointed out that the MFA requires fewer credits than the PhD and that colleagues in other disciplines do not hold it in as high a regard as the Ph.D. Their paper pointed out that faculty members who teach art and design at most universities in the US are paid less, have heavier workloads, and don’t have the same opportunities for advancement to tenure or to administrative positions that their colleagues in other disciplines have. This is the first national conversation to be held on the question of moving to a PhD degree in art and design, but it centered more around the question of academic respect than on the nature of research.

I don’t mean to belabor the question of academic degrees, but I think this has become inseparable from the question this conference is asking. As we proceed to redefine 3 artistic practice as research I think we should be asking ourselves why we feel this is important to do at this time. At the same time, I think we should be careful not to create a definition for artistic practice that is only understood and practiced in academia. Academic art has always had a bad name.

So, where does that leave us? How would one go about defining a research model for art and design that would be accepted by our profession and, at the same time, be recognized by those in other disciplines in academia as fitting into their own definition of research? I have to say there is a very great temptation here to just say that art and design have progressed very well without having to explain themselves by the standards of other disciplines.

The term “sensuous knowledge” suggests that there is a form of knowledge that is created and disseminated that uses other forms of language or meaning than numbers and words, the primary tools of the sciences and humanities. In fact, there are architects and designers in the United States and in Europe today who propose that, in addition to alpha, beta, and gamma knowledge (alpha being words, beta numbers, and gamma words and numbers), there is a fourth form of knowledge that they are calling “delta”. Delta knowledge is different from the others, they claim, because rather than trying to understand existing phenomena or things that already exist in the world through the use of words and numbers, delta knowledge is about trying to model something, in other words to create new things in the world. Delta knowledge is the knowledge that allows us to build, to give form to ideas. My own knowledge of epistemology is too limited to get much beneath the initial surface attraction of that idea, but I suspect there would be scientists and engineers who would argue that their research also models new things in the world.

In fact, in science, there are several forms of knowledge or research that can be simplistically broken down into pure science, or basic research, and clinical or applied research. Basic research is more speculative, the research of discovery and creation of new knowledge, while applied research has a more concrete goal in mind, to find new applications of knowledge for solving discrete problems: clinical research in medicine, for example. Can these models be transposed to correspond, roughly, to art, which, like basic research, is speculative without any particular application in mind, and to design, which is the application of knowledge to the solving of particular problems? One way to test that idea is to ask, do they, like pure and applied science, share a common knowledge base? Is there a theory of design that is fundamentally different from a theory of art?

What I like about these two approaches, the definition of delta knowledge and the correlation of pure and applied research in science to the arts, is that they seek to create definitions and models for research in art and design that fit existing models used to describe research in the sciences and humanities without forcing the practice of art and design to adopt the methodologies of research in science and the humanities. What I am looking for is a definition of practice-based research that is formulated from what artists and designers do that is uniquely their own. If we try to change the work of artists and designers to fit a new definition of research that is based on some other discipline, I’m 4 afraid we risk becoming indistinguishable from the discipline we emulate. The definition we are seeking should grow directly out of the tools and language of artists and designers. If we are going to try to create a new tradition — call it sensuous knowledge if you like, we should begin by stating that the real research that is conducted in the art and design disciplines is work that occurs at the highest or most advanced level in the studio.

So, the question before us is, what would that work look like, what is its content?

I would like to use the rest of my time to show you how design research has developed at the Rhode Island School of Design in just a single department, Industrial Design.

Some years ago, before I came to RISD, faculty members in Industrial Design began to develop an area of focus in their own work or in the classes they taught. This area of focus grew out of ergonomics, or human factors, a subject first introduced to Industrial Design in the US by the designer Henry Dreyfus. In the design process, human factors simply means the designer uses the human body as the primary element in design, how the body moves, its weaknesses, strengths, dimensions, and so forth. In the 1940’s, when it was first really developed, it helped design better desk chairs, for example. However, what it meant to the design team at RISD was to give design a purpose or value outside its own discipline that led to collaboration with researchers in other disciplines. It was no longer just the application of the principles of art and design to manufacture to ‘make things look good,’ it was the use of design as a methodology to investigate and solve problems that were not in themselves about design. It meant having to understand something about mind and body in order to use design to bring new knowledge, or new applications of knowledge, to products they designed. I like to think of that as the first step toward design as research. No one called it that twenty years ago probably, and they were far from the first to discover human factors, but it started something that has developed in very interesting ways and has led to design work that would not have occurred without having taken that first step.

About the same time ergonomics was taking hold at RISD, an interest in material science began to develop. Again, material science was not new, but designers at RISD, and here I’m including industrial design and architecture, were interested in materials and products that reduced energy usage, either in their manufacture or operation. Once again, architects and designers had always been concerned with materials used; it was part of the discipline. But when asking the question about energy consumption, their knowledge of materials made it possible for them to begin to solve problems outside their own discipline. They were using the tools and language of their discipline to do research.

This isn’t the only way for design to become research. There is also design theory and history, but the history of design, while it is certainly an area for research by an historian, is not design research. What interests me about the two examples of design research I have described is that they utilize the very process of design, a process and methodology that are very different from other forms of research, to investigate phenomena that are not located within their own craft or aesthetics and that bring that knowledge to work in collaboration with researchers in other disciplines and bring the unique contributions of 5 the design discipline to research on larger problems requiring multiple disciplines to solve. To me, that’s one requirement of research. I’m sure we could debate that.

The second thing that makes the design work in ergonomics or ecology research to my mind is that the phenomena being studied using design as a methodology are important. Now, again, we could debate that. I don’t mean to say that all research has to have important social applications or even that it must solve problems. But remember, I’m talking about applied research, not basic research, which can be much more speculative than applied research and may or may not lead to an application. Not only are these problems important, they lead to new problems. That, I think, is another requirement for something to truly be research – the first solution to the problem doesn’t complete the research, it only leads to other, related problems.

Let me show you some examples.

Ten years ago, a group of faculty and students from several departments took on the problem of the kitchen in one of their design studios. They were already very well informed about ergonomics, but they decided to go beyond the standard human factors questions and to apply what is now called universal design to the kitchen. Universal design, for those of you unfamiliar with the concept, is using design to make products or environments accessible to everyone, regardless of age, or physical impairments. So, the problem was to design a kitchen that meets the standards of universal design. This required breaking the kitchen down into processes, cooking, water delivery, storage, and so on. Time motion studies were also done and a goal was set to reduce the number of steps in meal preparation by 75% and to make it accessible to people of all ages and physical condition as possible and to conserve both human energy and other natural resources. This resulted in appliances designed to fit different spaces than where they are usually found, pop-up dishwashers, grey water irrigation systems, electronic consumption tracking, and other innovative solutions.

The project lasted for more than a year and eventually became a research project that was funded by two different appliance manufacturers. Eventually, the design work done on the Universal Kitchen was exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, and the intellectual property developed over the course of the project was purchased by Maytag Corporation for $1 million.

This project seeded much of the research currently being done in several departments at RISD today. It also introduced our design departments to many of the issues surrounding the transfer of knowledge to the public sphere. As a result of the Universal Kitchen project, RISD now has an intellectual property policy, one of the first developed by an art school in the US. The money that was derived from the sale of the intellectual property helped to establish the RISD Research Foundation, a separate non-profit organization. The mission of the research foundation is to fund faculty research projects that uphold RISD’s educational mission and make a positive impact on people’s lives, the environment and/or the fields of art and design.

Another thing the Universal Kitchen project led to was the idea of design for extreme environments. Again, one of the requirements to my mind for design research is that it is a process that leads from one problem to the next. One of the projects RISD designers became involved with after the Universal Kitchen Project was to do design work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the federal agency in the United States that is responsible for the exploration of space. RISD designers teamed up with engineers from NASA and the Johnson Space Center to examine the difficulties astronauts face in micro-gravity and the exploration of space, one of the most extreme environments humans face. As the duration of space missions increase, the design standards for the equipment and habitats used in these environments need to be reevaluated, and go beyond earlier approaches that emphasized survival as the primary design criteria. These increasingly extended durations in space requires the incorporation of a more “human” approach to the human factors of design for extreme environments.

So, like the kitchen, which can become an extreme environment for someone with physical disabilities, weightlessness is an extreme environment for the able bodied person. But the research area is now expanded. It’s not about either kitchens or space capsules, it’s about a design strategy or methodology that mitigates environmental hazards.

The extreme environment idea also led to collaborative research between RISD designers and scientists at the Aging Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT and RISD students, researchers and faculty worked to develop new concepts in technology, interfaces and products to meet the needs of an aging society. This included problems and products in the home kitchen, bathroom, hand-held electronic devices, and wireless communications. Products from the class were used to develop new concepts in technology for the aging.

Universal design for extreme environments relate to another project in Graphic Design, a funded research project that applies the concept of universal design to making the internet accessible. Phase I of the Universal Web Project produced a body of research exploring demographic trends, tools for users with special needs, and technology designed to meet those needs.

Phase 2 of the project responded to needs confirmed in Phase 1 and research focused on specific sub-disciplines within graphic design (font, image, color, information architecture, interface design, navigation, etc.). These included an assessment of the validity of Universal Design philosophy for Interface and design for the internet; an examination of existing Internet communication aids for the disabled, a thorough research on legibility, readability, information architecture, navigation and interactivity, and anticipation and integration of future hardware and software technology.

These design projects have several things in common:

• They use the tools and methodologies of design, not the tools and language of other research disciplines.
• They use the design process to address a problem that resides outside of the design discipline.
• Design is integral to the research. By that I mean that the design is not cosmetic or simply a way to make something look good. Design is used as a process to solve a problem
• The problem they address is important. That is, the development of a design solution has value that improves people’s lives, the environment, or the field of design.
• The design research is not limited to the solution of a single problem but, rather, becomes a research methodology that can be used to solve other problems in collaboration with researchers in other fields.
• New knowledge and insights were created that took the form of intellectual property or patents.

I want to end with a short DVD that shows a little of the work done by the NASA design team. It takes about 15 minutes, after which I would be happy to try to answer questions.