Jonathan,
If you review my comments on conferences, I have been clear to distinguish between different kinds of conferences. I support not-for-profit conferences sponsored by learned societies, professional organisations, and universities. I have been critical of profit-making conferences hosted by profit-making conference organisations that exist to earn money from researchers and scholars too new in the research field to recognise the difference among kinds of conferences.
I support all serious research conferences and all serious journals. These are not “competitors” as you put it, but colleagues. We are all competing for interesting papers and good articles by first-rate presenters and excellent authors, but we are not “competing” in a profit-making market-place.
The La Clusaz Conference on Doctoral Education in Design was sponsored by the Design Research Society. It was the second in a series of conferences that began in Columbus, Ohio, and went on later to Tsukuba, Japan. The conference was also sponsored by the Norwegian School of Management, (now the Norwegian Business School) a not-for-profit business school that currently ranks 38 in the Financial Times listing of European business schools. DRS and NSM subsidised the conference extensively. The consulting firm ICS of Switzerland and Norway provided conference support services at no charge, while helping us to secure five-star conference facilities and dining at an extraordinarily low cost. This was not a for-profit conference. It was a research conference, and the conference organisers raised a massive amount of funding that we spent to reduce conference costs for all participants, including full scholarships for PhD students.
David Durling — co-editor of the proceedings — and Keith Russell established this list following the Columbus conference. It was quiet for a couple years, but it took off following the La Clusaz conference. As Klaus Krippendorff notes, many list subscribers were participants at La Clusaz.
If you look at the list of authors in the proceedings, you will see the editors and board members of a dozen top journals from the leading research publishers, a good selection of deans and former deans, a large number of people who are now leading professors in the field, and many leading experts in the field of doctoral education.
The proceedings has been out of print for many years. We have had many requests for copies that we could not meet. David Durling no longer has a paper copy, and neither do I. Following a long search, we located a copy, and with help from Heico Wesselius of Swinburne University of Technology and Gjoko Muratovski from Auckland University of Technology, we were able to get a clean, readable, copy-enabled .pdf. This effort took time, and the cost would have been significant if everyone had charged for the services they gave.
I am using this list — and others — to inform people about a valuable resource. Like the conference, this is a not-for-profit research document, and we paid to produce it. We are not promoting it to make money, but to share the content.
To summarise, I support all serious, not-for-profit research publications and conferences.
My warnings involve profit-making ventures with no connection to learned societies, professional organisations, or universities. These conferences do not serve the field. This does not involve competition. It involves protecting research students and inexperienced researchers from predatory publishers and predatory conference organisers.
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University Press | Launching in 2015
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
—
Jonathan Bishop wrote:
—snip--
Can you explain why you use this list to promote your conference proceedings, yet say that your competitors’ conferences are fake?
—snip--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|