Dear Karel,
Thanks for your response. It is very helpful--an interesting set of
distinctions.
I wonder if you agree that it can be important for a doctoral student to
understand how their research is positioned in these broader terms? It
seems so to me. We speak of the "elevator ride talk" for graduate
students--imagine that you get into an elevator with a CEO or some other
person and he or she asks what you are working on. One has only the
duration of the elevator ride to convey the essence of one's work. It is a
good exercise, I think--and realistic, too. I think your distinctions help
in that direction, as well as others.
I will think more about your distinctions and try to map some student work
that I know about.
Regards,
Dick
Richard Buchanan
Carnegie Mellon University
--On Thursday, December 16, 2004 7:53 PM +0100 Karel van der Waarde
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> A while ago, I collected about 70 PhD theses in the field of visual
> communications (fairly loosely defined.) I found it useful to plot
> these theses in two diagrams or maps:
>
> Map one: a square with the following corners:
> - investigating an historical topic,
> - investigating an educational topic,
> - investigating a practical topic (topic in design practice),
> - investigating a research topic (topic in design research).
>
> Map two: a triangle with the following corners:
> - philosophical thesis: developing arguments
> - empirical thesis: experiment based, developing interpretation of new
> data - descriptive thesis: artefact based: developing new artefacts
>
> Disserations that appear close together on both maps have several
> things in common, but it became also clear that these can have very
> different theoretical bases.
>
> (An advantage of this kind of mapping is that the 'white areas'
> become obvious ... If anyone is looking for a research topic in
> visual communication?)
>
> Kind regards,
> Karel.
> [log in to unmask]
>
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