Design-Based Research, Design and Engineering Cognition, and Ethical Know-How

• In Event: Design-Based Research in Gaming and Virtual Environments

Abstract

Recent economic and environmental crises remind us of the urgencies for understanding ingenuity and technology. Hence, throughout the past century it has become increasingly important to study how designers, engineers, and inventors think or process information at hand and what goes through their minds. Arguably, new technologies and production processes along with a return of do-it-yourself (DIY) culture invite or configure everyone to employ inventive practices or “designerly ways of knowing” and thinking (Cross, 1982, 2001a, 2006). Designerly mindsets now mark cognitive interaction with technology. Given new demands, expectations, and responsibilities of design and engineering cognition for new responsive or interactive consumer products, it is arguably just as important to study the cognitive processes or systems of everyday users and lay re/designers of new technologies. Sampling cognition among these distinct groups is important not only for facilitating and regulating inventive practices and innovation, but also for the challenges of learning and teaching technology.

At the same time, design-based research (DBR) ostensibly provides deep insights into the process of design and cognition. Advocates of DBR attribute its recent origins to Ann Brown's (1992) and Allan Collins' (1992) methodological descriptions of design experiments. Brown described herself as a “design scientist” attempting “to engineer innovative educational environments and simultaneously conduct experimental studies of those innovations…. In the classrooms and in the laboratory, I attempt to engineer interventions that not only work by recognizable standards but are also based on theoretical descriptions that delineate why they work, and thus render them reliable and repeatable” (pp. 141, 142). “Technology provides us with powerful tools to try out different designs,” Collins explained, “so that instead of theories of education, we may begin to develop a science of education. But it cannot be an analytic science like physics or psychology; rather it must be a design science more like aeronautics or artificial intelligence” (p. 15).

In this paper, we review research into design and engineering cognition beginning with its scope and theoretical frameworks followed by an analysis of current trends. What frameworks and samples of design and engineering cognition most productively inform DBR? The goal is to outline a significant, yet under-developed, aspect of research.

Maybe too easy of an epistemological divide, problems addressing how people learn or know in conjunction with what they learn or know define these trends. If researchers are to understand what enables intelligent or creative interaction-with-the-designed-and-engineered-world, they will have to give up convictions that this is dependent on a deployment of what a person knows. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991, p. 148) remind us that this interaction is much more so a matter of know-how or, increasingly, ethical know-how (Varela, 1999). Varela (1999, p. 75) defines ethical know-how in terms of “moment-to-moment awareness” and “authentic caring.” Skilled behavior— design and engineering cognition and DBR— can be a combination of “spontaneous coping and rational judgment,” yet Varela reminds us that this does not necessarily translate into “right action” (p. 6). How might DBR directed toward understanding ethical design and engineering cognition?

Authors

• Stephen Petrina, The University of British Columbia

• Franc H. Feng, The University of British Columbia