How do practitioners decide? How does a doctor know which pill to prescribe? How does a manager know which strategy to follow? How does a designer know which form to shape?
A relatively new approach for a variety of different practices is to use systematically gathered evidence to inform decision-making processes and crucial judgements, for example evidence-based design, or evidence-based management.
This movement originated in evidence-based medicine, which has seen the development of a very elaborate and rigorous system of reviewing clinical studies in the Cochrane Collaboration to aide decision-making processes of medical practitioners. Neither evidence-based management nor evidence-based design have reached this point yet. Both are just emerging within their disciplines and are not well received by their peers. Both struggle with the gap between practitioners and researchers in their fields. And both see themselves as medieval in a way. In a recent report (2005) the UK Commission on Architecture and the Built Environment concludes:
“The ways in which office accommodation can create value for a business (…) are [still] inadequately understood. (…) The collective failure to understand the relationship between the working environment and business purpose puts us in the position of early 19th century physicians, with their limited and erroneous notions about the transmission of disease before the science of epidemiology had been firmly established.”
And a recent blog on Evidence-Based Management similarly reasoned:
“In management we are still in the middle ages of science, where the alchemists still try to make gold from lead. And by alchemists I mean all types of managers (managers, consultants, coaches, interim-managers, project managers, etc.). One of the reasons why managers still make decisions based on anecdotal evidence, gut feeling or a whim is the fact that management is not a profession. Well, perhaps it is, but we lack a body of knowledge and skills. Everybody with decent qualifications can become a manager in contrast with nurses, judges or engineers. Management is still treated as a ‘skill’ and if you have a better story than the next guy, you just found yourself a new career.”
Architecture at least is a profession. Its professional body, the RIBA, accredits its education and approves of a recognised set of knowledge and skills. And in architecture and design first attempts have been made to compare and bring together evidence, for example in the online database InformeDesign.
Still both aspects do not guarantee a better evidence-based practice. Where there is a profession and an institution, there is also history, tradition, culture and the ways in which things have always been done. Systematic research is not at the heart of architecture (even though it should be!), and there is an ongoing discussion what architectural research might be. This is also reflected in InformeDesign, which suffers from incompleteness and lack of methodological rigour.
So is design really ahead of management in establishing a recognised and meaningful evidence-based practice? In a recent paper for the Design Research Society Conference 2008, we have outlined three components for a renewed evidence-based design practice:
1) a scientific and theoretical basis in organisational sociology and its relationship to physical/spatial design;
2) the equivalent of ‘aetiology’ in a hypothesised ‘mechanism’ (organisation theory, sociology and their relationship to design) behind the proposed intervention;
3) a well constructed methodology including: a method of measuring the organisational performance outcomes of interest; a method of measuring the design variables that the aetiology suggests are relevant to these performance outcomes; proper case study based approach to pre and post analysis; a valid statistical analysis that is not reductionist, but that recognises that the systems under observation are highly complex and variables cannot be excluded for scientific convenience, but must be controlled for through representation, quantification and inclusion in the statistical analysis.
There is a long way to go, and similarly to discussions in evidence-based management, practitioners and researchers in design would have to join forces to make evidence-based design relevant and meaningful.
