STEDEX '09INCULCATING A DESIGN RESEARCH CULTUREThe Faculty of Design and Architecture is located in the centre of excellence for agricultural education of Malaysia. The faculty is blessed with this position as it is bestowed with agricultural excellence opportunities beyond the mere raw materials, machineries and processes involved in producing high quality agricultural products. Agricultural excellence includes the development of high quality living environment man made and natural that would support the well being of farmers and entrepreneurs, the artifacts they use and the environment they interact with. Hence, the United Nations Agenda 21 challenged design researchers to look deeply into the social, economic and environmental components while majority of UPM’s faculties spearhead further innovations in agriculture. We have come to realize that to move forward, design researchers and practitioners must reach out to collaborate with others in order to understand and embrace their uniqueness for us to excel as the creative integrators. We shall lead in collaborative research and teaching. The faculty had initially thought that by introducing three research niche areas: a) Environmental Design Behaviour, b) Environmental Design Technologies andSystems and c) Environmental Design Integration, it will be able to inculcatethe necessary design research culture on campus. The first Environmental Design Behaviour Research Group focuses on both applied and theoretical developments pertaining to environmental behaviour in the natural and built environments. The second Environmental Design Technologies and SystemsResearch Group include research and application of advanced technologies and systems in promoting sustainable products and their green development. The final Environmental Design Integration Research Group focuses upon research and practice activities throughout the product development lifecycle with emphasis on the design phases that influence their implementations and post-operations. Alas, the number of new authors is not encouraging after three years running while the pool of existing authors excelling ahead as the research niche areas support their research programs. Informal observations and interviews informed us that lacking of writing skills and having weak scientific research skills are main culprits. Imposing the pursuit of a doctoral degree to junior design academicians after certain period of appointment has been quite successful in producing researchers though it is a timely process. On the other hand, it was not the lack of creative ideas that discourages publication. It was rather the lack of writing skills that impede design academicians. No matter how many so-called scientific or academic writing workshops the faculty conducted, the responses were not encouraging to design academicians. An obvious answer is, design academicians were not trained to write. Instead, they have been trained to visually communicate their ideas using available visualisation tools either manually or virtually. Therefore, we strategise how faculty can exploit these visual communication skills for creating its citation-indexed articles for a research university. There are two other related factors that require further studies if faculty intents to forge ahead in this direction. Firstly, where these visually communicated articles would be accepted for publication and secondly, how can these articles qualify as citation-indexed articles. It is here that our indexing journey starts. «« BACK |
