Hi, Alison,

Thanks for your thoughtful post. I’m with Tiiu and Gunnar. PhD-design
is a good list. It’s open, and everyone is welcome to wade in.

That may seem more daunting than it really is if you’ve haven’t
been a regular participant. I’m going to share a few thoughts on why I
don’t think wading in as a new voice is as difficult as it may seem.

The fact that this is an open, unmoderated list is a major strength for
our community. David Durling and Keith Russell created the list after
the 1998 conference on doctoral education in design in Columbus, Ohio.
The list was relatively quiet for a couple of years. In the run-up to
the La Clusaz conference on doctoral education in design, we had a
robust debate on another design research list. At one point, some folks
got to grumbling about the fact that the debate was going on to long and
at a depth that was too scholarly and wasn’t it time to call it quits?
We agreed to end the debate prior to the La Clusaz conference, and to
move debates to another list.

PhD-Design is that list. Everyone is free to talk, to jump in, or to
stay out. No one is permitted to end a debate or to call any debate to a
close while people wish to speak. Once or twice, we’ve had on-line
conferences with specific rules. These have been quite successful, but
for the most part there are no rules other than general netiquette and
the rules of the JISCMAIL system. By and large, there’s no need for
rules, and on those one or two occasions when a ruling has been
required, Lex JISCMAIL is clear: the list owner is the law. That’s all
background to say that this leaves us a community that welcomes the deep
and serious, tolerates the shallow or silly, and encourages (or permits)
everything in between.

From time to time, the discussion can bog down in arcane details. The
problem is that one person’s arcane detail may be another person’s
exciting central point. We get to lurk or jump in depending on how we
feel.

The same variety appears in the matter of voices. Some talk a lot, some
talk a little, some lurk. I used to talk a lot. Then I left the life I
in which someone paid me to pursue the questions that interested me to
take a job that requires me to spend most of my time serving others. I
used to choose the problems that interest me. Now I work on the problems
that other people bring through my door. When it comes to the list, I
mostly lurk. If I get lucky, an interesting question and a block of time
come together. Today, I am sitting in a hotel room in Seoul getting
ready for the IASDR conference. Your note caught my eye when I had time
to respond rather than merely read and think.

These kinds of issues are at the heart of what makes the list go around
for many of us. You’d probably classify me as one of the old guys
rather than as a young voice, but the world I experienced as a young
voice has a lot to do with why I like this list. When I was a young
voice with a fresh-minted PhD, the design field was a field largely
defined by programs of art and design practice with little room for
research. That was 33 years ago. In those days, most design programs
were located in departments or schools of art and design. Some were
located in universities, some in polytechnics, and some were located in
independent art and design schools. Nearly none of the art and design
schools had a doctoral program unless it was in art history or sometimes
in design history as a branch of art history. People with a PhD were
rare. Many considered us odd simply because we had a PhD. Some of us
may, in fact, be odd – but not because we have a PhD.

The field as it was at that time was far narrower, and – for some of
us – far less open. One marvelous discovery at the Ohio conference was
that there were more of us around the world than we realized, all
relatively isolated. Life was difficult for serious research scholars
and scientists in an interdisciplinary but immature academic field.
Design programs, departments, or schools were populated and defined by
professional practitioners who came from an art and design background or
a background in the professional practice of studio design. Despite the
fact that our studio colleagues were located in universities or tertiary
institutions, they were not research scholars, and they did not
understand the issues we worked with. Some were not even academics, and
they were often confused about what it was that anyone did in
universities other than teach specific vocational or professional
skills. While many practitioner teachers in these design programs were
excellent at what they did and superb in their skills, others were not.
What unified the good teachers with the bad, however, was a general lack
of understanding about research and the role that research could play in
improving design practice – and the role of research in adding to the
store of human knowledge. As a result, our colleagues were often
intolerant and suspicious of what we did.

This is not unique to the design field. Medical education was in a
similar state at the start of the twentieth century. Engineering went
through a similar process starting in the 1930s. Management studies
still struggles with this. So does information science, but the
astonishing role of information technology in every phase of human
experience has encouraged the information fields to evolve their
research base more rapidly than might otherwise have been possible. 

In the 1989, I wrote a chapter on “Design Science and Design
Education” for The Challenge of Complexity, a book published by the
University of Art and Design in Helsinki. While our field has evolved
significantly in the past two decades, this is not always the case at
art and design schools. Someone discussed the paper at a recent
conference on design education – and found much of the paper relevant
today because many of the challenges and problems remain the same in
many schools. 

The point of PhD-Design is that it shapes an open, online community
where we can all meet and talk with each other, wherever we are. If
we’re lucky enough to be at a great faculty with a solid research
program, welcoming colleagues, and terrific research students, it adds a
bit to life and gives us additional opportunity. If we work in a school
that may be good at research but far from design – as I was in Norway
– it enables us to be active in the discourse of design research and
design. But some of our 1,600 or so members are less fortunate. They are
located in programs that struggle for excellence – or even in programs
that frown on research. For them, this list is a vital, added community.
For all of us, it is an opportunity to enter a conversation with
colleagues (and sometimes friends) we don’t often see, to hear their
views on current issues, to pose questions and get answers, to post
research requests and get help, and often to learn something about ideas
we did not know would interest us until someone opened a thread on
PhD-Design.

So please do post or respond when you want. For different reasons, new
voices may sometimes be neglected. But interesting new voices are just
as likely to establish a powerful presence here as to be ignored. You
have no idea how often some of the debates here bore people – even
when it’s our friends debating, someone may be like to say … “Oh,
good grief. There he goes again!” while perking up our ears for a new
idea from someone who has not yet been on the radar for us.

So I say, thanks for your note, and welcome. You raised issues that may
other doctoral candidates and younger researchers have thought about
raising. I know that people speak to me about these issues at
conferences, even if they don’t put them forward to the list. I am
absolutely certain that I speak for many of the old guys who say to each
other – and to our younger colleagues – what I have tried to say
here.

And now, I will end this note. I sadly suspect that some people are
delighted with the fact that I moved from a research post to a day job
that keeps me from posting as often as I used to do.

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia