Hi All,

I have kept out of this thread and not followed it in detail. But it does seem, as Holly and Gunner have suggested, that the requirement for a Phd is somewhat procrustean and restrictive. There are other criteria that are applicable. This would be true in any professional practice, not just design.

Having said that, it seems to me as a relative outsider, that the narrower and more conservative views expressed on this thread are driven by the institutional constraints of higher education in our time, not by notions of professional standards and rigour in research. 

More universities are competing with each other for diminishing funds and a shrinking pool of paying students. For some time now I have observed that more and more of my university colleagues are unhappily working harder for less reward or opportunity. There is a drift away from the academy among many bright and able people, and those that remain tend to adopt a siege mentality. At the same time, governments who fund universities are making increasingly (and often absurd) demands for accountability and quality control. These are not happy places!

There are a few protected enclaves (until the next round of funding cuts), but the overall picture, from where I see it as a visiting and adjunct prof at a few universities, is not conducive to a broad ecumenical view of education and research. Even in contexts where there are brave and innovative people, there is not the funding to sustain the innovation for any length of time.

I recently contributed to an ICOGRADA initiative on the future of graphic design education  (to be published shortly). The idea of a broader notion of design education, as suggested by Don Norman, has been around for a long time—at least since the 1930s—but realising that broader notion has failed in many design disciplines, most notably in graphic design. Don repeats a familiar critique of this failure, suggesting its origins are intellectual. I have in the past made this type of critique too. But I am coming round to the view that the problems are economic, not intellectual.

If we added up all the skills, knowledge, and experience that students would need in order to take account of our broader notions of design, we would have to at least double the teaching and learning time on an undergraduate or post graduate degree. The real question is then, not to do with curriculum design or educational philosophy, most of which is now understood, but rather who pays for the extra tuition and teaching costs? As many academics know, this is a familiar question to which the only contemporary answer is "do more for less". 

The danger is that the pie will get sliced ever thinner. The necessary craft skills that form the current core of the design curriculum will have to be reduced to accommodate such things as usability testing, stakeholder management, ethnography etc. In the end, nothing gets done in sufficient depth or with sufficient proficiency, skill, or imagination. This, more than anything, makes the current generation of craft teachers, who dominate design education, suspicious of and resistant to a broader conception of design entering the curriculum. I think they have a point.

BTW I don't have a phd.

David
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