effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is a swampy lowland where situations are confusing “messes” incapable of technical solutions. The difficulty is that the problems of the high ground, however great their technical interest, are relatively unimportant to clients or to the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of greatest human concern. . . . There are those who choose the swampy lowlands. They deliberately involve themselves in messy but crucially important problems and, when asked to describe their methods of inquiry, they speak of experience, trial and error, intuition, and muddling through. Other professionals opt for the high ground. Hungry for technical rigor, devoted to an image of solid professional competence, or fearful of entering a world in which they feel they do not know what they are doing, they choose to confine themselves to narrowly technical practice. Owen (1998 → Text 4) can be positioned in the pragmatist tradition, too, even if his approaches appear more “scientific” than Schön’s. Owen is one of those who believe that design is a special form of knowledge production and that, although design’s own research culture is still young and weak, the importation of methods from more established disciplines does not necessarily contribute to the development of the discipline (1998, 10): those who seek to work more rigorously look to scientific and scholarly models for guidance, and we find references to “design science” and examples of “design research” that would seem to fit more appropriately in other fields. Yet, it is reasonable to think that there are areas of knowledge and ways of proceeding that are very special to design, and it seems sensible that there should be ways of building knowledge that are especially suited to the way design is studied and practiced. . . . Owen analyzes the knowledge-building and knowledge-using processes in various scientific and non-scientific disciplines and arrives at the conclusion that these processes are fundamentally the same for inquiry and application. The differences lie mainly in the purposes of the activity, and in the codes and value bases that are used. In order to illustrate the graduate studies at the Institute of Design in chicago, Owen presents a clustering according to the well-known analytic-synthetic / symbolic-real matrix, which is used at ID chicago as a universal structural framework and which can be traced back to Kolb’s pragmatist learning cycle (1984) and even earlier models. Analytic is related to
18 MAppING DESIGN RESEARch