Professor Bruce Archer CBEDRS LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: SPEECH TRANSCRIPT
Richard Buchanan:
(RB HANDS AWARD TO BRUCE ARCHER). Bruce Archer: AUDIENCE APPLAUSE Being an aging academic really is rather like being a great grand parent. You do feel terribly indulgent towards the third generation. But actually, I feel most…..… respectful of the first generation. Anything that can be said of me is really due to the marvellous group of students and staff that we had in the Department of Design Research over the years, within that period of 25 years of highly productive work; productive in two senses. First of all we were developing a lot of ideas, and secondly we did turn those ideas into physical products. Many of those physical products were both commercially and technically very successful. Several of the things that were designed in the Department in those years are universally in use in hospitals in the United Kingdom. This was due to the kind of work we did in interdisciplinary teams. One of the characteristics of the work of the Department of Design Research was that it was wholly interdisciplinary. We had industrial designers, we had engineering designers, we had philosophers; we had ergonomists, we had technicians, and it was the interaction of those that we were able to produce not only ideas but also artefacts which embodied those ideas. I am terribly grateful to the staff and students of the Department. Anything that can be said of me really has to be said of them. I don’t think that they have been adequately recognised for the information they produced. One of the studies done in the Department was an investigation into the degree to which research had actually penetrated professional practice in design. The findings of that research were that almost nothing was transferred from research into design practice. The only thing that got transferred was that some people, who had acquired that knowledge, became teachers in architectural design schools, and that they tried to transmit the knowledge. But almost none of it got into professional practice. And that is astonishing. I often wanted to compare what happened in industrial design and what happens in medicine. In medicine, research does get transferred into practice. Not after thirty years, but often after quite a short period of time. I believe this is because the medical profession can still engage in apprenticeships. Doctors whilst still students have to serve in hospitals, as doctors. Under the guidance of senior doctors they learn as they go along. And the research which is being done under the same leading characters in the hospitals gets transferred into practice very rapidly. We don’t do this in design. We don’t run apprenticeships. We don’t have our student designers working in real hospitals, in real practices, in real offices, and as a result extremely little gets transferred. There is a real difference in fact between the mind set which you have to have to be a successful researcher and the mind set you have to have in order to be a successful designer or practitioner. Because if you are a practitioner you have a limited amount of time, you have a limited budget, you have limited amounts of information available, and you have to get a result……. You have to get a result!.... You have to get an answer!... It may not be the best of all possible answers, but it has to be an answer which shall work. And so you are able to make judgements…..you are obliged to make judgements, which are based upon imperfect information. But if you are an academic researcher, the situation is quite different. There you have to investigate and disbelieve all your results. You have to disbelieve all the information and test it. It is a perfectly proper thing in research to have searched every square, to have looked at all the literature and come to the conclusion that there is no connection between the given and the expected. You can come to a nil result in research! You cannot come to a nil result in design. You have to get a result. And as a result the mind set you have to have is quite different. I think it is quite a demand on an individual to move from the practice of research to the practice of design, and vice versa. In fact, I discourage…... I used to discourage practitioners from going into research whilst they were still engaged in practice. I think it spoils their ability to make decisions, and so if you become a researcher you should do so full time, full bloodedly, for a certain period of time, and then go back into practice. So the kind of set we tend to have in design schools, in which it is practitioners… who are guiding research… and future practitioners who are doing research, is not going to work. We really ought to be much more like the medical profession. Anything that can be said of me, and any contribution I have made is really down to the students and staff, who I enjoyed in those 25 years. There are more than a 100 of them and some have made it to senior positions in the academic world, and in the practitioner world. I salute you all. You are what have made design research what it is, and it is you, if you are able to seize the opportunity, who will make it into something more. So I salute you. God Bless you all. (Bruce raises his glass to those present.) AUDIENCE APPLAUSE
To Award Address for Professor Bruce Archer.
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