Dear Don
I certainly understand that there are different approaches to the PhD- not only because of different expectations in different countries but also because of different disciplines. This applies to design in that it is influenced by so many disciplines. Having provided supervision in design doctoral education for nearly 20 years I have see a range in quality of dissertations- even though there is only a pass/ fail option in assessment. For me the massification of doctoral education raises issues around minimum expectations. As such I would be interested in knowing what you saw as a minimum requirement for the award PhD
Deirdre
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Associate Professor Deirdre Barron
Centre for Design Innovation | Faculty of Health Arts & Design
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On 18 Mar 2017, at 1:41 am, Don Norman <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
A note about the recent discussion that started out about "Stigmergy in
[Design] Education" and soon digressed.
It is clear that different respondents have very different views of the
purpose of a PhD dissertation. Here is what I was trained to believe. I am
not claiming this is correct and the others wrong, I am simply saying that
this is the view I grew up with. My learning comes from technical fields:
engineering, psychology (my PhD is in Mathematical Psychology), and
Cognitive Science.
My view comes from these fields and from the universities I have taught at
or spent considerable time at: University of Pennsylvania, Harvard,
University of California, Northwestern, Cambridge.
The PhD is supposed to be a significant contribution to understanding and
to the literature.
I repeat: The PhD is a major contribution to knowledge and to the
literature of the field. Many PhD theses have been published with little
revision and have made major contributions. (Noam Chomsky's PhD thesis in
linguistics was published almost verbatim and revolutionized linguistics
(and I then took the very first course he taught at MIT using his newly
published PhD thesis)
In these cases, the PhD dissertation is NOT training how to do research.
That training is assumed to have been accomplished in order for the student
to make a major contribution.
==========
Poor Eduardo. We will never agree. You said:
These people dare to say that a design education that, since at least,
early 1500’s was wrong, regardless that it made almost all of our useful
visible world… In fact, these people were nourished outside design
education and shamelessly protrude their views of education based in their
original areas.
You are obviously referring to me (perhaps others). We inhabit different
cultures. To some, the fact that this is how designers have long been doing
things shows how correct it is. To some (e.g., me), it shows that it is
time to rethink. The world has changed dramatically: so too must our
learnings and methods change.
If you read my writings, you will see that I am asking for a new form of
training for a new breed of designer. The traditional skills are excellent
at doing traditional things. But traditional skills are not very useful for
those of us who redesign medical procedures and organizations, or as we
contemplate the manner by which people interact with driverless cars, or as
we try to understand how to bring together different views, needs, and
stakeholder values in the underprivileged areas of a city to reach some
consensus in order to provide improved environments ("improved" as judged
by the views of the inhabitants).
Yes, we need different training if we are to do different things.
I have zero formal credentials as a designer. So you are free to ignore
what I say.
Don
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