Good on you stefanie, for getting in there!
Katherine
---
Katherine Hepworth
Research Assistant
National Institute of Design Research
Swinburne University of Technology
144 High Street Prahran
Victoria 3181 Australia
Telephone 0401 408 804
Facsimilie 03 9521 2665
www.swinburne.edu.au/design
>>> stefanie di russo 07/10/11 11:06 AM >>>
This thread has sparked my interest on a few levels. Allow me to be bold
enough to explain why:
When the discussion lead to impressions of academia and design in Australia,
I found it interesting that Teena commented:
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.
I can speak as a PhD student in Australia, that this impression is true to
me. However I largely assumed this was to preserve the quality of education.
I also have found it true that most PhD students in design come from a
(practical over academic) design background. But i also believed that this
was necessary for design...
This lead to the comment:
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.
Yes i (and others) do see myself as a designer AND design researcher. In
terms of struggling to learn or write in an academic way- i feel this is
mainly a problem of the school or institution that is teaching. I always
held the assumption that in creative fields such as design, the process of
learning, and in particular acquiring 'academic/research' skills was
proportional to the level of education.
At an undergraduate level in design in Australia you are primarily learning
practical and technical skills- the 'craft' with small amount of writing. In
honors you may take subjects that assist writing essays, whilst refining the
craft. Masters perfects this craft, whilst simultaneously increasing
academic (writing and researching) skills. Should students choose to
continue, they are somewhat prepared for a PhD. Institutions should also
assist skills needed in academia for students within their first year of
doctoral study.
I studied my undergraduate at RMIT, with masters and now PhD at Swinburne
University. I can say based on personal experience that Swinburne assists
students to 'cross over' from practical application to academic in their
masters program.
That said, i think the impression:
They also consciously DID NOT promote their research qualifications to their
> design clients as they did not see this as enhancing their design
> credibility.
is an outdated one. It assumes design's place is locked in applied craft
than academic research and knowledge. I still design whilst researching and
i push the importance of understanding what it is designers do in order to
evolve and perform better.
In regards to:
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.
I feel that this is largely to do with (and im sure i will be corrected) the
fact that at an undergraduate level, to be a designer you need to perfect
your craft before you can 'reflect' upon it. The extreme alternative would,
as was mentioned earlier in this thread, 'replace' practical design with
social science or academia.
There is a disturbing attitude particularly within Australia that graduate
study in creative fields is 'useless'. I hate to admit that I constantly
need to defend my position as a PhD student in design. As mentioned before,
this to me largely reflects an outdated assumption that design is purely
applied and post grad education is - in this context- a "waste of time".
Perhaps the way to remedy this problem IS to introduce more research
knowledge into applied design education at an undergraduate level. As
stated, balance would be key so that the practise evolves rather than being
replaced with an existing field of knowledge and all other academic
assumptions associated with it.
Now to go back to the core of the debate, Derek Miller explains:
1. There may be some value in aligning educational conduct (i.e. what we
> teach and how) with actual evolving design practice.
> 2. That means, as designers (at least some designers) are pushing the
> boundaries of design practice into new areas (or are helping shape and
> re-conceptualize familiar areas), it seems pretty clear to me that they
> nevertheless lack some of the needed intellectual skills required to
> properly engage those new practices from a degree of professionalism.
> 3. Mapping those gaps between the "know-how" and the "need-to-know" seems
> less a theoretical task than a pragmatic one to keep education both current
> and innovative.
> 4. My immediate concern is that students are not really being prepared for
> the work they think they are going into, and more to the point, they don't
> know they aren't prepared because their education is so distant from the
> social sciences and other fields necessary to illuminate their own gaps.
I think this summary reflects what i am discussing and perhaps what changes
need to be made within the industry that will in turn change attitudes
towards the industry. Design education - for the most part- knows where it
should go but is still fumbling through the fuzziness of how to get there.
This evolution (ironically?) largely depends on the investigations performed
by PhD students and researchers to understand why, where and how design and
design education should evolve in the future.
thanks,
Stefanie
Twitter: @stefdirusso
On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 9:25 AM, ALISON BARNES wrote:
> Hi Rob/Teena
>
> I totally agree about the language issue Rob, as Keith Russell said a while
> back on the list, undergraduate students are using research methods, but
> unaware of it, as they just think they are solving the brief. I guess this
> is, as you say, about moving from tacit knowledge to a position where
> through reflection it can become implicit and capable of articulation.
> However, I don't think it is just about language, as by knowing there is a
> language out there that relates to a body of work you can dig further into
> the methods/approaches/ideas. I also think students aren't just engaging
> with social science in relation to visual methods. I think a lot of what
> might considered to be ethnographic methods (and others) are used as well,
> but again students are unaware of this.
>
> Also, relating to the earlier posts about sketching/drawing, depending on
> the type of designer you are, one's sketchbooks aren't necessarily going to
> be full of sketches, or perhaps visual in the traditional sense. As someone
> who is primarily interested in relating to the world through language and
> typography, mine are full of words. In the past have had to defend students
> whose work develops in a similar way to this with colleagues who think the
> only way to work with a brief is to find the answer through experimenting
> solely with media.For me, 'sketching' can take a variety of forms, not all
> of which are solely visual.
>
> Cheers,
> Ali
>
> On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 11:05 PM, Robert Harland >wrote:
>
> > Hi Teena
> >
> > On 6 Oct 2011, at 22:14, Teena Clerke wrote:
> >
> > -snip-
> >
> > > 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.
> >
> > Agreed. Although some 'basic qualitative research' skills are also
> > practiced unknowingly in art school environments. This is directly
> aligned
> > with what a social scientist may refer to as visual methodology, but in
> art
> > schools is better known as sketchbook development, or equivalent. I find
> it
> > is not so much a struggle, more an issue for language use to connect what
> > has traditionally been an 'implicit' rather than 'explicit' practice. In
> > fact, just recently, in reviewing a first year PhD animation student, I
> > tried to encourage how grappling with the language of research
> methodology
> > may be the key to collaboration beyond art and design. In that particular
> > case, it was about the need to articulate the process of animation to the
> > non-animator, as a potential research method explaining how animation can
> > support research in traditional scientific research. Perhaps I'm stating
> the
> > obvious to say that regarding generating research questions, the process
> of
> > good sketchbook inquiry represents a desire to find something out, but
> > usually evidenced through 'images' more than words.
> >
> >
>
|
