Hello Vivek,
As a PS to Ken's responses, I will add a couple of thoughts for you.
The issues of both "original" contribution and footnotes are recurrent issues in many design faculties. However, regardless of the faculty, the question I hear asked when examining comprehensive exams and theses, is "so what"? After all the problem-setting and thesis proposals, how does the work proposed contribute to original knowledge in the field. This gets complicated in design disciplines, as these are emergent for the most part, and "knowledge" is still being formed, or may not necessarily exist yet in the field of study.
However, re: the footnotes, many prefer to see the "robust literature review" mentioned by Ken rather than many thick footnotes. In my own case, this was the preferred approach. Footnotes detract from the body of the study. As I am not a fan of footnotes this suited me well, and I wrote 2 chapters to develop the literature review to support a) what existed in the field; and b) what might be new ways of considering designing and learning about designing, in my case, as philosophical knowledge constructs.
Hope that this helps?
Best
Tiiu PoldmaUniversité de Montréal, Canada
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> Date: Sat, 6 Apr 2013 03:00:51 -0400
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: How not to write a PhD thesis
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> Dear Ken,
>
> Thanks for the wonderful post. It really made a few things clear for me.
>
> However, I do have a question about original contribution and what counts
> as original contribution in design research.
> A new design methodology maybe or a design framework? How microscopic
> should a good topic be in design research?
>
> Thanks,
> VK
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