Beware straw men.
> * If you effectively remove all faculty who are not formally trained through
> a PhD requirement, how will you engage with their kind in the outside world?
Lots of people with PhDs are quite engaging. Lots of people who are faculty
engage with people who are not faculty, as part of their teaching, researching
and living.
> * How can you have anything to say about design if you live in your own
> hermetic bubble world of journals and PhD lists?
Lots of people with PhDs read journals and PhD lists, and also magazines
and newspapers, and go to exhibitions (both artistic and trade). Many even
have friends; some, surprisingly, have clients. Nearly all unfortunately watch
television, which these days seems filled with reality TV shows about design
(Project Runway Season 9 climaxing soon - 'Back to Parsons, designers!').
It is actually very difficult to live in a bubble these days.
> * How can you be truly alive if you are in a self-selecting echo chamber of
> your own research culture and thereby are never challenged to work with
> those who see things differently?
Lots of people with PhDs are alive (despite the post-terminal nature of their
degree in the US). People with PhDs who self-select to avoid being challenged
are bad academics, bad designers and bad people, but this has nothing to do
with them having a PhD. Lots of people without PhDs self-select to avoid being
challenged. In the US, they are called The Tea Party.
> * How can you be effective if, in privileging the PhD voice over any other,
> you thereby fail to practice the kind of participatory design culture that
> you might well preach in lectures when designing your programs?
By doing PhDs with/in participatory design? Or participating richly in design
cultures after you've finished a PhD? Who is trying to stop who from participat-
ing with this sort of question?
I am not defending a university system that uses the PhD as a metric for its
managerialism.
I am defending the value of an increasingly rare thing: a type of degree that
secures you 3-5yrs to study something significant very thoroughly, so
thoroughly that you, with the support of peers and experts past and present,
will discern something new and worth telling others, in your discipline(s) and/
or your practice(s).
My question is: what practitioner would not want that privilege, that opportunity
to evaluate and extend their practice?
When Leon von Schaik (with others) initiated RMIT's practice-based PhD pro-
gram, he did so by inviting leading practitioners he knew into the program.
Those practitioners agreed because it gave them, at last, the chance to:
> receive peer critical feedback on their practices beyond short magazine
reviews of their designs
> access a space and time and process in which to critically interrogate their
own practice beyond post-client debriefings and come to appreciate its value
and its limitations
> undertake speculative work that could develop their practice in new directions
> articulate to their professional community what their practice had allowed them
to come to know, knowledge that was otherwise buried within firms, and some-
times within individuals in those firms.
Very few, if any, were interested in undertaking a PhD to become qualified
for academic positions.
Whatever you think of the Invitational Stream at RMIT's 6 monthly Graduate
Research Conference, it attests to the possibility that PhDs can be very
beneficial to mid- and late-career practitioners. This is exactly what the US
is missing out on by having insufficient PhD programs, especially practice-
based, in design.
So let's not let this debate descend into caricatures of people with PhDs
as socially autistic. Just look at this email for example.
Cameron
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