Design doctorate in computing: a defence of "doing cool stuff"

• Authors: Edwin Blake
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 Annual Conference of the Southern African Computer Lecturers' Association
• Year: 2009

This position paper argues that it is time to extend the notion of worthwhile scholarship in Computer Science to embrace Design and to award doctorates of Design. There has been a concerted effort to place Computer Science on a firm empirical footing as Experimental Computer Science (ECS) [1]. The essential method of ECS is to built artefacts and then evaluate them experimentally [2][3]. An examiner of a doctorate in such research tends to look for a unified proposition that is defended by argument. The dissertation is expected to contain a coherent theory or thesis that is defended by means of facts and reasoning. It will have a theoretical insight which is validated by artefacts which play the role of exemplars or testbed. The real contribution is the theoretical insight. However it does seem artificial to require a proper experimental investigation of the effects of an artefact, when the artefact in itself is the thing of creative interest and passion. It seems that ECS does not pay enough attention to "Design". In this I am echoing Fred Brooks: "the scientist builds in order to study; the engineer studies in order to build" [4]. Computer Science derives from at least three disciplines, each with a different epistemology and methods: mathematics, experimental science and design or engineering [5]. As Matti Tedre [6] succinctly puts it: "It is notoriously difficult to conduct research in the intersection of research traditions without making a mess of it". The question here is how to do good design and get recognition for it. It is apparent that Computer Scientists are simply not accepting the calls of ECS. A repeat [7] (after twelve years) of the Tichy et al. [3] survey of ACM publications showed that in "Design and Modelling" papers still lacked empirical validation.