Jenny Woods to Niall Hobhouse
When questioned by the faculty Director, the landscape architect, somewhat patronizingly, replies: ‘Oh, these are concepts in landscape design which you would probably find hard to grasp’.
To which the Director: ‘Well I’m an intelligent woman, and I’ve got all morning …..’.
Made me smile!
You were asking in an earlier email how physical scientists advance enquiry and defending design practice as research.
I became more aware of the problems of advancing enquiry when I stepped back from research myself and became involved in the process of research management. I ran Peer Review Committees which allocate government funding to individual researchers and departments. It is difficult to get committees to assign money from an all-too-limited pool for really ground-breaking research, i.e. for attempting things that may fail - even though those committees may be made up of scientists who themselves wish to carry out such fundamental research. I’m sure your social scientists will have something to say about the behaviour of groups here. The funding councils try to improve the process: sometimes by setting up separate ‘blue-sky’ funds (but then debating whether this just ring-fences the problem) and by really pushing the message out to the community that a well-conducted process of enquiry which comes up with no answer may be just as worth while pursuing as one that does. Such an enquiry will have other benefits: training of young researchers, guiding other workers in the same field by defining the problem better, etc.
….the more I have been thinking about the composition of the above paragraph, the easier it becomes to draw parallels with your process of designing for Hadspen and, perhaps, the more convinced I become by it…
I shall now view you as a blue-sky programme judged by a (non)peer-review panel managing a learning process that may be allowed to ‘fail’ in order to better define the problem. So long as you write it up for a journal somewhere my world-view is now put to rights!
I’m afraid there will always be ‘traditionally-minded’ scientists who view research as trying to find very small things (fundamental particles) or very far-away things (quasars) with very large (and usually very expensive) things (particle accelerators and telescopes), but I would join in the defence of attempting to understand how humans experience, interpret and interact with their environment (whether natural or built) as being research - but I doubt every instance of design practice is tackled as such an open question.
In the meantime… I discussed the Hadspen project with the EGS design students yesterday - I’d be interested to know whether your registrations go up this week as a result - might show whether my audience was listening! Certainly some were very engaged by the idea and I hope they will enter the competition. We did a quick straw poll on the FOA design, with about 15% liking, 45% not liking and 40% wishing to suspend judgement. Having discussed the traditional principles with the class: simplicity, unity, balance, scale, etc, etc, as a framework for approaching a design project, FOA’s approach made an interesting contrast!