Dear Colleagues,

The "doctor dropout" thread offers many "me, too," moments. The posts 
from Dick Buchanan and Artemis Yagou especially caught my eye, each 
for different reasons.

Dick's response to David Durling nicely states my reason for posting 
the article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. This thread is 
more about beginnings than endings. It is about how we can do things 
better, and why improvements matter. Among other things, this 
requires learning from failure. The issue is learning the right 
lessons.

An intriguing conversation I had on Saturday sums up the issues we 
are addressing here. One of my colleagues is interested in doing her 
PhD. She recently received a tenured position after several years of 
part-time work. She teaches future practitioners in highly rated 
courses. She values good teaching, and she is respected as one of our 
best teachers. She also has a lively consulting practice doing 
workshops in her specialty for large Scandinavian companies. By all 
measures, she is a great success.

She welcomes the security of a tenured faculty position. However, she 
wants more than security and money. She wants to contribute from a 
higher level of skill and knowledge than she now has. She is willing 
to sacrifice several years of higher salary to buy the time for 
research studies.

There are many reasons to earn a PhD. While the possibility of income 
is one of them, there is no guarantee of long-term faculty employment 
in higher education, the sector that formerly hired the greatest 
number of graduated doctors. The one expectation we should have for a 
PhD program is the opportunity to develop research skills, to deepen 
knowledge, and to use the skills and knowledge for research or for 
better professional practice.

While I understand Rob Curedale's view on lost income, Carl DiSalvo 
has it right for most of us. Rob's problem is what we call a "luxury 
problem" in Norway. He is a senior designer with extensive executive 
experience. He works on the top of level of the profession. It has 
been a long time since a PhD would have added much income to Rob's 
lifetime potential. Rob earns so much money that he faces far greater 
financial sacrifices than the rest of us might.

The half a million US dollars that Rob would lose is based on a far 
higher salary than most of us make. A PhD takes three years in most 
European programs and the five to six years in most American 
programs. To lose half a million dollars, you'd have to earn an 
annual salary of 135,000 Euros or 94,000 pounds in Europe for three 
years of doctoral study. In the US, you would have to earn 100,000 
dollars a year to lose half a million over the five years of an 
American program. Most of us did not earn that much before our PhD or 
after.

As Carl points out, there is a new profession emerging, and those 
with solid research skills can undertake work that is paid at better 
rates than those who lack those skills.

As it is, I know one designer on Rob's professional level who thought 
that earning a research degree would serve his needs. He did his 
doctorate part-time, and he is happy that he did. He is the principal 
and CEO of his firm, so I doubt that he is earning more because of 
it, but I do think the additional skill he brings to his work makes 
his firm more valuable to his clients. This fact may well be 
reflected in additional lifetime earnings for a firm in a highly 
competitive field.

Peter Gariepy asks a good question, and I will give my answer. I 
found earning a PhD rewarding. I was curious about some questions. I 
needed tools to help me answer the questions. As I developed better 
tools, answering questions uncovered deeper questions, and so on. It 
is three decades since I finished my PhD. I still do not have all the 
answers I sought. Even so, I have had a rewarding search, learning 
much and gaining great value along the way, finding new questions to 
explore, and managing to answer some of them. I also developed 
practical tools and skills that enable me to serve others better. For 
the record, I finished my PhD in 1976 when art and design schools had 
little interest in research and no interest in hiring anyone with a 
PhD in fields other than art history or design history. I made my 
living doing many things until life finally brought me an academic 
post in 1994.

David Durling and Klaus Krippendorff both seem to have had similar 
experiences, each in different ways. It seems to me that Teena Clerk 
and Susan Hagan are doing the same, much as Geoff Matthews did. Glenn 
Johnson wondered about the element of self-actualization. It seems 
that many of us spoke to self-actualization in some way. Some 
addressed the way that doctoral education helped them to enrich and 
actualize a life in design, some in education, all in research, and 
all as human beings.

Teena puts the issue nicely, writing "I hope what is gained is to 
learn how to question my knowledge, understand the ways in which this 
knowledge is constructed, and to affect change in, or to contribute 
to, the design discourse (my thesis forming part of this)." Design 
research has many purposes. Some aspects of research inform design 
practice, some aspects of research answer questions that may not have 
immediate practical application: all affect change in and contribute 
to the design discourse.

Earning a research doctorate involves developing research skills that 
enable us to contribute to the discourse. This is different to a 
professional doctorate enables us to do our job better. As Teena 
notes, some doctoral projects provide "an opportunity to draw on the 
'knowledge' of both practice and research by celebrating these 
differences in choice, rather than feeling like there is no choice."

Education for an advanced research degree has several values. A 
slight detour to the thread may shed light on some of these issues.

An article that I recently read asked whether a PhD is aimed at 
research training or at making original contribution to knowledge. 
The answer is both. Research training provides the skills that enable 
one to contribute. The original contribution to knowledge 
demonstrated in a thesis project shows that one has acquired the 
craft of research in the same way that craft guild artisans made 
their the journeyman piece to demonstrate their ability in craft 
guild skills. The thesis culminates research education by 
demonstrating the ability to conduct original research at a 
journeyman level without the immediate supervision of a senior 
researcher. The criterion of an "original contribution to knowledge" 
does not require a major contribution. The criterion requires an 
ORIGINAL contribution of some kind, large or small.

Much as a journeyman piece required the apprentice craft guild 
artisan to demonstrate the fundamental skills of the craft guild 
trades, so the thesis requires the apprentice research to demonstrate 
the fundamental skills of the research trade. The criterion of an 
"original contribution to the knowledge of the field" entails 
demonstrating that the candidate is able to understand the research 
process and what it involves, to conduct research, to answer research 
questions, and to reach conclusions of some kind - practical, 
theoretical, conceptual, professional, scientific, or scholarly. 
Since one must demonstrate research skills to produce a thesis that 
meets the criterion of an original contribution to knowledge, the 
thesis serves to benchmark the skills.

One question for those of us concerned with doctoral education is 
creating programs and an institutional context that enable doctoral 
students to develop the skills they need to contribute to the design 
discourse at a high level. Another is serving the needs of specific 
individuals who come to us in the hope of developing these skills. 
Both of these questions meet in the framework of supervision.

David's comments focus on supervision issue. (So did Eduardo 
Corte-Real. Those who are interested should accept Eduardo's offer of 
the IADE journal with articles from the workshop on supervision. If 
you missed the offer, you can write to Martim Lapa at  
[log in to unmask] or to Carlos Duarte at [log in to unmask] to request 
a copy of the doctoral supervision issue of Idade da Imagem.)

Supervision is one key to solving this problem. The situation is no 
better in Europe than in America. The difference is that American 
universities keep better statistics. The institutional situation is 
worse in design because we are a young research field.

Artemis Yagou mentions the 90% attrition rate in Greece. High 
attrition rates are only one measure of the problem. There are two 
equally bad problems.

A second problem is zero attrition. One doctoral program in a 
university-based architecture school had no attrition - NONE - in a 
20-year period. During those two decades, the university graduated 
only two doctors in design. What they ALSO had was a cohort of two or 
three dozen unfinished doctoral students who never made progress and 
never completed.

We see a third problem in schools with a completion rate that reaches 
nearly 100%. These universities - and several art and design schools 
- effectively graduate everyone who enrolls and pays tuition for 
three years.

No failures, ever, suggest supervisors who lack the skills they 
require to BOTH help students complete AND to equip them with the 
skills they need for a research degree.

The attrition problem has come into focus in North American 
universities precisely because the emphasis on good skills and robust 
development has created a context within which many programs fail to 
provide the appropriate level of personal support that enables 
students to complete. There are ALSO objective factors outside the 
control of the program. Chris Nippert-Eng's article in Idade da 
Imagem discusses some of these.

North American universities and European universities face two 
different kinds of problems here. North American universities have a 
robust structure in place, but they often lack the systematic 
personal attention and individual care that balances rigor with 
mentoring and support. In this, North American universities have had 
a systemic advantage. All but a dozen or so North American 
universities emerged after the 1805 reforms of the Humboldt era 
responded to Kant's challenge in The Conflict of the Faculties.

The vast majority of North American actually emerged a century or 
more later. These universities benefited from the chance to see what 
others had done. In contrast, many European universities are still 
struggling with the heritage of medieval governance and program 
structures. Others are fresh-minted research universities with no 
programmatic foundation for research and research education. This is 
the general situation in art and design schools, including art and 
design schools merged into universities or newly designated as 
universities. Very old schools and very young ones both suffer 
different problems. These problems are equally bad for doctoral 
students.

What must be said at this point is that these schools have yet to 
reach the kind of problems that North American universities are 
addressing. The attrition problem of a robust program is entirely 
different to the non-completion or attrition problem in a 
fresh-basked school with no doctoral tradition at all, or hardly any.

This is not entirely bad. Just as North American universities learned 
from the Humboldt reforms and then learned from each other, we here 
can learn from the current struggle of North American universities. 
Se can build on their experiences to do better if we ALSO build on 
the general approach to quality that enables their programmatic 
successes as well as their personal failures.

It is symptomatic that in the great North American research 
universities start their PhD programs in art and design with careful 
planning and development, while many European programs jump right in 
on the apparent principle that the right to award a PhD must mean the 
ability to do so at the right level.

We have had some rich dialogue on these comparative issues in the 
past - at the first conference on doctoral education in design in 
Ohio, on DRS in the Picasso's PhD debate, at La Clusaz, and in our 
on-line debate on design in the university.

If we are genuinely interested in making progress for our schools and 
for the individual doctoral students who join us, perhaps it is time 
for general systematic attention to these problems. The issues that 
become evident in attrition and supervision are linked to many of the 
reasons that cause programs to succeed or to fail.

This has been an extraordinarily interesting thread so far, and I 
have gone on longer than I intended to do when I started to write. I 
will finish with two quotes that caught my eye.

David's comment is cautionary: "I do recognize that my experience is 
perhaps quite different to some others. There is still a lot of poor 
supervision and training around, and it is clear to me that some new 
doctors will never be able to conduct good quality independent 
research in a competitive environment.

"My advice always to prospective doctoral candidates is to sort out 
why they want to undertake doctoral study. It might be for career 
reasons, but it might just be an itch that has to be scratched. Then 
shop around and get really good supervisors with PhDs, with a track 
record of successful completions, in a department that has the 
infrastructure to support the needs of research students."

Carl states the promise that awaits us on the other side of the 
process, "the ability and the opportunity to set a trajectory of 
lifeline invention and discovery."

Yours,

Ken
-- 

Ken Friedman
Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management

Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School

+47 46.41.06.76    Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95    Tlf Privat

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