The Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort university was designed for this very purpose and there are a good number of music students working in the devising of musical instruments within the Music, Technology and Innovation research centre.

A

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On 20 Aug 2012, at 17:56, Simon Biggs <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Our PhDs can do something like this, although they still need to deliver 50% of their output in the form of a thesis. However, our focus is research through practice (rather than research into practice) so the practice is where we hope to see the main research being undertaken. In this case the thesis is used to articulate the context of the research (both practice and theory), the analytical framework, the criteria for evaluation, an outline of the research methods and a detailed description of the work undertaken, with a concise outline of the final outcomes. We have students undertaking PhDs co-supervised between art/design/architecture and computing/informatics/engineering, as well as crossing over into the humanities and social sciences. We also have some working in bio-engineering as creative practice, which is a growth area (sorry about the pun).
> 
> The key thing with a PhD, as with all research, is that it has to deliver novel insights of value to others, not just the person doing it, and to do this the outcomes have to be articulated in a public context where others can readily access and understand the work. That is a challenge for any researcher, not just a PhD.
> 
> Aside from here at Edinburgh I'm aware that Newcastle, Queen Mary, Lancaster and Goldsmiths support such PhDs, as do MIT, UC Irvine and Carnegie Mellon in the USA. There are others as well, including in Australia and Canada.
> 
> best
> 
> Simon
> 
> 
> On 20 Aug 2012, at 17:17, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
> 
>> dear friends,
>> 
>> over the last weeks i've had two requests for advice from artists who are working with digital technologies and who feel that career-wise it might be good to do a PhD, even though they are both not the "i want to sit down, study a theoretical topic related to my practice, and work on a philological book for 3 years" types.
>> 
>> rather, they are artist-engineers who build things and invent new usages of old and new technologies, their's is an artistic practice that is closely related to the construction and moulding of ideas in technical hardware.
>> 
>> what i am wondering is whether for artists like this, rather than going into heady art&research PhD programs, it would not be better to try and find a *technical* department that understands the cultural significance of their work. if they have to submit a phd-thesis about their work as techno-cultural-artistic devices, incl. technical and artistic explanations and contextualisation, that might be more realistic - and possibly more appropriate - to achieve?
>> 
>> do people have experiences with such "engineering PhDs for artists"? and can you name schools that are open to such research, possibly in cooperation with a partner art school?
>> 
>> best regards from a steaming hot berlin,
>> 
>> -a
>> 
>> -- 
>> -------------------------------------------------------------
>> Leuphana Universität Lüneburg - Leuphana Arts Program (LAP)
>> Dr. Andreas Broeckmann
>> Scharnhorststraße 1,  C5.225,  21335 Lüneburg,      Germany
>> [log in to unmask]           http://www.leuphana.de/lap
>> -------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
> 
> 
> Simon Biggs
> [log in to unmask] http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk
> 
> [log in to unmask] Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/  http://www.elmcip.net/  http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/
> MSc by Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practices
> http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/degrees?id=656&cw_xml=details.php