foundationsMode 1 and Mode 2: What can they offer to field- specific design research?This chapter has been built on the two cases, both taking place in a context of research
education for professionals from creative fields like architecture, urban planning,
industrial design and the arts. The objective for presenting and discussing these cases
has been to examine what the opportunities are with regard to the development of
design research within frameworks inherent in each of the two modes of knowledge
production. While the major part of the chapter was devoted to introducing these
two modes and to presenting them further through the two cases, this part will briefly
examine the cases in terms of a comparison between mode 1 and mode 2 and will
conclude with what each of the modes can offer to field specific design research.
The ‘diagram case’ builds on the statement of helga nowotny, one of the key
figures of the mode 2 movement. nowotny maintains that in order to qualify as a
mode 2 researcher, one has first to be competent as a mode 1 researcher. The diagram
illustrates how doctoral scholarship has developed from the middle of the 1970s and
until the present in the scandinavian academic milieux of creative professions, mainly
architecture and design. The diagram helped to show that while this scholarship
previously seemed to emulate disciplinary fields, the discussions on mode 1 and mode 2
that started around 1996 facilitated more field- specific concepts of design scholarship.
The most recent part of the diagram argues that the two modes of knowledge production
can be adequately addressed by design professionals in their field- specific scholarship.
The ‘diagram case’ was devised in a traditional academic context, i.e. that of mode
1 knowledge production. The components of the diagram have been defined as (a)
the result of a free search for knowledge which has traditionally been an obligation and
a privilege of university staff, to which the author belongs. The diagram expresses (b)
a search for basic causal relationships between doctoral scholarship in design fields and
various premises. The internal premises have been based on design research itself, while
the external premises were the national, and later on, european university laws. The
causal relationships and the logic of their construction, pointed out in the diagram, had
to be discussed by a community of peers. To do so they had to be presented in a way
which exposed (c) the ideas, methods, values and norms considered as sound research
practice. in this presentation the author of the diagram made (d) an emphasis on her
individual creativity. although the diagram was developed in recent years, it was only
possible to construct it over time as (e) a continuous process. The (f ) quality control of the
diagram construction process was executed by a peer- review commission of the scientific
committee of an international research conference. The scientific committee that had
the authority to accept or refuse the diagrammatic reasoning of the author consisted of
a group of international experts, which is a typical (g) hierarchical organization form and
decision- making system directed top- down. The (h) distribution of the knowledge developed
through the diagram’s construction happened through a mode 1 medium in the form
of conference proceedings (dunin- Woyseth 2009).
The ‘fairy tale case’ of the transdisciplinary project on securing housing safety,
presents and discusses a project on crime prevention by an architect and a policeman.
The project built on a long process of various activities by multiple stakeholders, a
process initiated from the need for practical solutions for housing safety. in the
postscript after the project presentation, the architect- scholar looked at the work