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“It seems to us that there was a time (not too long ago really) in which your professional experience as a designer (as well as your teaching experience) was the most important factor to get a job as a design lecturer (at least in the UK in product design courses). Now it seems that it is your research background (for example holding a PhD) what mainly counts to aspire to a lecturing position. If this is the case, how it will affect the working prospects of those design graduates trained by researchers? What is the value of research experience against professional experience in the context of teaching undergraduate and MA design students?
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“In universities where it has become policy to have PhD as an essential criteria for new posts it can be a struggle to recruit staff who have a PhD relevant to design studio teaching, can do practical teaching and have strong industry links/ practice. These people don't seem to exist.”
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The condition of hiring PhD holders in Design has been quite prominent with many universities over the past decade - in Australia especially. However, this has not necessarily been done at the expense of professional practice. This is also how I ended up working for the university sector.
I have built my design career first as a designer working in manufacturing and then as a consultant in the corporate sector. I was interested in developing my research proficiency not for the purposes of working in a university, but for becoming better at what I do. My PhD was in Design Research and Corporate Communication Strategies and I was doing my studies while I was holding the position of Director for Corporate Communications.
For me research was always an integral part of design practice, and frankly, I don’t even know how to start designing without conducting research first. And by research I don’t mean exploring creative solutions while I reflect on my own practice. By research I mean conducting evidence-based information gathering, synthesis, analysis and contextualising research data from real world scenarios and translating this into workable design briefs.
When I was offered a full time academic position at the University of South Australia, this was not only because I had a PhD (even though this was seen as the most important thing for the university). The position was offered to me because I had a research based PhD, relevant industry experience, and a professional qualification as an art and design teacher. The combination of these three components (research proficiency, professional experience, and teaching qualifications / experience) is what is seen as an ideal scenario for a contemporary university. So, to reflect on Katie’s post, the people that have such background do exist, but they are very few.
This is important for universities because a university education is not only about getting a job. If a designer wants to get a job in the industry, they do not need to go to a university in order to do that. They can take a course in a technical college, which would be sufficient for an entry-level job at many places. Most design jobs are not based on the qualifications a person has, but on the strength of their design portfolio. This is where the professional experience of the teacher comes in handy.
However, I have to note that a designer with a university education should aspire to achieve more than just landing a job. The research skills are essential for designers if they are to question existing paradigms, to challenge the status quo, and introduce new currents of thinking in industry. By combining research with practice design becomes not only a job, but also a career. This is seen as an alternative to the traditional ‘master - apprentice’ model of studying and practicing art and design which has been prevalent since the time of the Renaissance.
However, I have to note that teaching research in design without sufficient understanding of professional practice is not good either. In such case, the generated knowledge through the research process becomes too esoteric and usually cannot be applied in a real world context - which in return significantly reduces the contribution that design can make to business or society. And this is why a combination of both research and professional experience is necessary when selecting a candidate for an academic post from a contemporary university perspective. At least this is what I am looking for when considering candidates for an academic post.
Finally, I also want to say that there are enough opportunities for everyone in design education. I also have experience in working for one private European academy where the only thing that mattered was my professional experience. This was at a time before I had a PhD and no one at this institution had a PhD - but everyone had active professional practice. And this was fine because this was a traditional institution that was only focused on training studio -based designers. They didn’t pretend to be anything more than that, and they had many students who wanted to be trained just to be studio designers. But this is not enough for universities that have global ambitions.
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Dr Gjoko Muratovski PhD, MDes, BA(Des), GradDip(Des)
Senior Manager: School of Art & Design
Head of Department: Communication Design
Auckland University of Technology
Auckland, New Zealand
Chairman: Design for Business - Research & Strategy Conference
Melbourne International Design Week
The Design Foundation
Melbourne, Australia
Editor-in-Chief: Journal of Design, Business & Society
Intellect Books & Journals
Bristol, United Kingdom
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