Dear Alison,
like you, many of the design courses in which I have been involved in teaching at undergraduate 
level often continue to neglect or struggle to include basic qualitiative research skills and processes 
that, for example, generate researchable questions and research designs. 

On the other hand, while yes, it seems that in Australia one has to have a PhD to even get a job 
interview to be an academic these days, many people working as academics are designers with 
PhDs, rather than academics with no design experience – indeed, my own PhD research has found 
this to be the case both here and in the UK. Perhaps one of the reasons is that the courses they are 
required to teach in are pragmatically focused on designing, while undergraduate students are 
pragmatically focused on becoming designers, rather than broadening their perceptions about what 
being a designer means to researching. That is, students often generally avoid reading at all, let 
alone critical engagement with scholarly articles, and also resist moving outside the albeit slippery 
boundaries of design. 

At first glance, this might seem like a catch-22, yet my research involved talking to design 
academics, most of whom had a PhD or were in the process of completing one, whose view was that 
they were designers who also taught, researched and wrote about design. And, for the most part, 
many of them struggled to learn how to research and write research, relying on design skills and 
reading outside the field to do so while continuing to design. They also consciously DID NOT promote 
their research qualifications to their design clients as they did not see this as enhancing their design 
credibility. That has also been the case for me, enrolled in an eduation faculty rather than design, 
and is the subject of a paper I am writing a paper for the DRS conference in July next year – how I 
used visual communication design skills to analyse qualitative interview data for my PhD.

So, rather than deskilling the academic workforce in relation to designing, I suggest instead there 
are many design academics who embody this crossover, and subsequently embed their research 
knowledge within their teaching practices that must be crossing over to students, despite the lack of 
formal research subjects. 

I wonder, do other design academics on this list also have this experience? 
cheers, teena