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"Objects" include products, of course, but also people can be studied with same methods, if the researcher is only interested in the exterior appearance and dimensions of human beings. An example of this is the study of human measurements which are necessary when you design furniture.
"Static" means here that the object is not moving or changing, or if it is the change is not essential and it will not be recorded. (For the study of movement or change, see Observation.)
When studying objects, like in all empirical research, it is advisable to start by defining the extent of your empirical material. There are two decisions that you have to make:
Once you have settled the two questions above, you can proceed to define which kind of knowledge you wish to record from the objects. It can be either
Another important question concerns the style of viewing the object. There are two principal alternatives:
Combining the two dichotomies above, we get a table which perhaps helps you in selecting a suitable method for the study of products:
| Holistic study | Analytical study | |
| Informative study (discussed on this page): | Documentary and historical study. Phenomenology. | Age of an Object. Registering Shapes. Registering Qualities. |
| Normative study (discussed on other pages): | Defining an exemplar to guide later designs. Designing an artefact. | Preparing a Product Concept.
Preparing Theory of Design. |
In holistic study the purpose is to portray the object exhaustively and include everything that can help understanding why the object has acquired its present state.
If you are studying just one specimen of an artifact, you will perhaps want to record everything that can be known about its history: the designer, his or her intentions in creating the work, the manufacturer, manufacturing technology, the original commissioner or buyer, the succession of the artifact's owners, its use, later modifications to it, etc. Histories of celebrated old buildings are great examples of such thorough studies of just one product. The appearance of each object is, of course, registered accurately through photographing or detailed drawings like the one on the right, made by Auguste Choisy for his history of architecture. This genre of research is discussed under Case Study.
The method is applicable when studying not only one single object but also a series of practically identical objects. For example, all the specimens of Volkswagen model 1945 are practically identical and you do not need to differentiate between them. The same method is possible even when there are differences between the specimens but this variation is not of a kind that would be of interest in the project. In the study of yachts, for example, you can decide that you need to differentiate between schooners, yawls, cutters etc., but you do not need to register more details of them than are presented in the figure on the right.
In the holistic style it is also possible to study a group of different objects. In that case the target usually is to describe the larger structure that these objects are parts of. This larger structure can be, for example:
Documenting becomes necessary when a valuable artefact is expected to disappear or deteriorate and we wish to conserve a description, an image or an inventory of it for later study.
Additionally, there are several types of temporary products and works of art, like packages, exhibition architecture, theater staging and ice sculpture. All these are physical objects, but there are also "diachronic" works of art like music and theater plays where the physical essence consists mainly of activity and only secondarily of objects. All these need documenting, otherwise very little will be left from them afterwards.
Often the need for documenting an artifact arises first when the artifact has already existed for a long time, during which it has perhaps been transported to a new location, sold, put to a new use, modified, etc. All these changes could perhaps interest later researchers and you should determine whether you should record them, too, or only the original conditions of the creation of the product.
Beside the product itself, you will normally want to register data about its makers and commissioners, documents related to it, and the views of persons related to it, if these people can still be interviewed.
Normally you will wish to record a holistic view of the artifact, in other words both its general appearance and also all relevant details. The normal method is photographing or by one of its modern equivalents. Usually you will record a series of views, both of the whole and of those details that are not clearly visible in the general view.
As a complement to photographs there is a large variety of methods for measuring dimensions, weights and other physical attributes, and the various drawing techniques that designers of comparable objects use, cf. Registering Shapes and Registering Qualities, below.
The selection of media for long-term storage of data is a science of its own, see Filing the Report and Material.
Phenomenological study of objects means approaching the study object, the phenomenon, as man's concrete experience, as free as possible from conceptual presuppositions. Perhaps the best known example of the method is in the book Poetry, language, thought by Heidegger (p. 32, as translated by Albert Hofstadter):
"How shall we discover what a piece of equipment truly is? The procedure necessary at present must plainly avoid any attempts that again immediately entail the encroachments of the usual interpretations. We are most easily insured against this if we simply describe some equipment without any philosophical theory."
"We choose as an example a common sort of equipment -- a pair of peasant shoes. We do not even need to exhibit actual pieces of this sort of useful article to describe them." ... "A pictorial representation suffices. We shall choose a well known painting by Van Gogh." ...
"From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far spreading and ever uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death." ...
"The peasant woman, on the other hand, simply wears [the shoes]." ... "When she takes off her shoes late in the evening, in deep but healthy fatigue, and reaches out for them again in the still dim dawn, or passes them by on the day of rest, she knows all this without noticing or reflecting."
Heidegger does not clearly differentiate essence from the meaning of a word in a language. Although etymology seems to have been particularly appealing to Heidegger, the historical meanings of German words will not always tell speakers of other languages much about modern objects of study. When looking into the essence of concepts, phenomenologists are easily trapped by the etymological history of their mother tongue while there is no guarantee that the conceptual contents of just that particular language would be universally valid.
Another weakness of the phenomenological method is that almost any object seems to contain several essences. When for instance the researcher notices the phenomenon of children's red playhouse, he can easily reduce it in many alternative ways, for instance as:
The aim of phenomenology seems to be the same as that of other
research methods: eliminating details that are less relevant to the
research project. If a phenomenologist succeeds in his aim and manages
to define the essence or "meaning" of the object in what he deems as an
accurate way, the reader should not be lured into thinking that all that is
necessary has now been said about the issue. Many research objects
are relevant to many people's -- not just the phenomenologist's -- lives in
several important ways. One single researcher can seldom make a
complete account of all these aspects.
It is obvious that even if the researcher, following the advice of
Husserl, avoids empirical approaches in his study, his knowledge of the
object is nevertheless always based on his earlier empirical observations.
In other words, his knowledge is very subjective. But in
phenomenological study, it is difficult for the researcher himself to see
this because he must avoid criticizing the results he has obtained so that
the sensitive and fragile insights would not elude him in the beginning.
As a contrast to holistic studies of objects, the goal in the analytic type of research projects is to register not as many facts as possible but only the interesting attributes of the object. These often belong to the following types:
More exactly the selection of attributes can be deduced from the initial problem of the project and from the model which we perhaps have selected as a starting point and which roughly defines the invariance we are searching in the material of study. In the research of products, some of the most typical attributes which we will want to record from the objects of study are:
When studying old objects we often need to know their age. If it is documented nowhere, the normal method is to measure one of those attributes of the object which we know varies in time according to a known pattern. Research methods that are based on this principle include:
The electrons which are liberated cause a soft, glowing light, i.e. luminescence, and the more luminescence there is, the newer the object is. This is because in older objects, more trapped electrons have already been liberated because of the quantity of ionizing radiation to which the objects have been exposed. And, of course, each additional year that the object has existed increases the quantity of ionizing radiation the object is exposed to. You must, however, remember that in heating and exposure to direct sunlight, the luminescence clock of the object is set to zero, and it starts building up again if the object is buried again. Factors like chemicals and other types of radioactivity which the objects have been exposed to can, however, jeopardize the reliability of luminescence dating.
Luminescence dating is especially appropriate when radiocarbon dating is not possible, for instance if no remaining organic material is found in connection with the objects that we want to date; or when the relationship between the organic materials and the archaeological contexts is uncertain; or when the age of the archaeological site is greater than the 50,000 year limit for radiocarbon dating.
The radiocarbon method is based on the fact that living organisms contain three carbon isotopes, of which C12 and C13 are stable and C14 is unstable or radioactive. The amount of all the three remains stable in live organisms, but as soon as the organism dies, C14 starts decaying at a predictable rate (after 5568 years only half of the C14 carbon will be left) because the animal or plant ceases its metabolic carbon uptake and stops replenishing the C14 supply.
By comparing the proportional amount of the stable isotopes C12 and C13 which do not decrease, and that of C14, we can determine the age of the organism. It is not possible to use the radiocarbon method to date organisms that are older than 50 000 years, because these have already lost all of their initial C14.
When gathering material, not for documentation but for analytic research the goal is not to register as many facts as possible but only the "interesting" properties of the object - in other words, those that pertain to the initial targets of the project. If the target is related with the shape and appearance of an object, the problem often is that in registering, a pictorial presentation would be desirable, but the normal method of photography produces too many details.
For example, a photo of an ancient Egyptian pot (on the left) highlights the broken and missing parts which only distract us if we want to get a picture of the pot. Therefore, in each research project, we should try to find such a method of presentation which emphasizes the essential things and hides the coincidental ones. This can often be accomplished by transforming the photograph into a line drawing.
On the right, there is an example of a usual archaeological
method of presenting pottery in such a way that one picture portrays both
outward and inward decoration and also the cross section. Each researcher can choose which details are important in his study and leave out the rest. (The two
illustrations above come from Holthoer.)
When searching an invariant pattern in several objects it can be useful to superimpose pictures of a number of objects like in the figure on the left. It presents the results of a survey made in Boston, where the goal was to find how inhabitants perceive the shape of their city, in other words, what is their "mental map" of it.
The data were gathered so that a sample of inhabitants in Boston were asked to draw the functional districts of their home city on a map. When the received sketches were studied, all of them were found different. To highlight what was common in all the sketches, the researcher copied all of them on a single piece of paper.
In the resulting fuzzy model you can discern the individual variation, but also those features where the respondents agreed. Exactly this was the invariant structure that the researcher was trying to define, and he finally draw it on an empty paper. (Steinitz, 1968.)
Another example of searching invariances from superimposed pictures is in the figure on the right. In the diagram, Sture Balgård shows how the old buildings in
Härnösand follow uniform proportions of width and height (the
red line) with just a few exceptions.
Here the invariance that the study wanted to define was not the shape itself but a certain ratio in measurements.
An alternative to superimposing a variety of pictures, is to draw by hand a pattern that seems to the researcher "average" or "typical" of all the objects, or of a class of them. It can be made by hand on a transparent paper, or with a special computer program.
The example on the left is found in the book Suomen kirkot (Churches in Finland) by Carolus Lindberg. He has sorted the 638 different medieval church buildings in Finland into 38 church types, and then compressed each type into a archetype, three of which are seen on the left. Beside these simple depictions he used verbal characterization for each type, examples of which can be found elsewhere under the title Typology.
Historically, the proportions in the dimensions of artifacts have been among the first static invariances that researchers have found. They are documented already in antiquity by Vitruve, and again in the Renaissance they were eagerly studied. On the right is a study from Leonardo, showing the ratios 1:3:1:2:1:2 that he found in the proportions of the human face.
When studying a number of objects with very little variation of shape it can be possible to do without any pictorial presentation and just to register a few salient measurements of the objects. This method has the advantage that powerful quantitative analysis methods can be used. The instruments, definitions and scales of measurement can often be borrowed from the designers of comparable new products, or from physical and engineering sciences.
Once the empirical measurements or estimations have been recorded the study can proceed to the phase of analysis. There are a few methods that can be used in the analysis of pictorial presentations; these include the methods of Comparative Study and Classification. A larger number of methods exist for the Quantitative Analysis of dimensions, proportions and other arithmetic invariances.
As stated before, the goal in the analytic type of research is to register not as many facts as possible but only those interesting attributes of the object which are contained in the model which we have selected as the starting point. This model defines, at first tentatively, the invariance we are searching in the material of study.
In the research of products, typical attributes which we will want to record from the objects indicate material, surface finish, colour, weight and other such straightforward properties which we can measure with standard instruments used by designers of these products.
If there is no standard method of measurement, we can often record the attribute with the help of human observers. These are asked to describe the object in verbal adjectives, perhaps with the help of semantic differential scales. If the property is difficult to define, like "beauty" or "style" of an object, the assessments of people will include much variation which sometimes is of interest to the reseacher, sometimes not (cf. Human Subjectivity and Objectivity). In the latter case the researcher then can try to remove it in various ways. Two usual methods are:
In the study of products, the interesting qualities are often related to the requirements that an artifact is expected to comply with, like its usability, function, beauty, attractiveness, meaning, ecology and the environment, economy, or safety. When studying these aspects the study easily becomes normative: we attach evaluations to some properties and declare which properties a product should have.
In normative study we usually accept as a fact that all evaluations are subjective, which brings to surface the question of who is the evaluator. Normally the evaluations are collected from a sample of people which is selected among the population that we initially have defined as the group whose opinions are to be studied. (The methods for recording opinions are explained in Interrogative Research.) If the aim is to assist in the development of new products, the sample is often selected among the target customers.
Once the empirical measurements or assessments have been recorded the study can proceed to the phase of analysis, the methods of which are discussed on another page.
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December 1, 2004. Original location:
http://www2.uiah.fi/projects/metodi
Comments to the author:
