Dear Ken, Eduardo, Jean and all,
(Warning- hideously long post)
Ken’s question to Eduardo is an important one-
“How, in your view, it is possible to build doctoral education for a PhD, the research doctorate, on the base of undergraduate and postgraduate studio education in the tradition of the academies and the artisan craft guilds?”
Well of course the simple answer is that it is already being built. Though I think to describe contemporary higher education in art & design as ‘in the tradition of the academies and the artisan craft guilds’ may be just a little disingenuous.
Since the practical, creative studio arts (including various fields of design) exist within the university system, with all of the back up of research degree training and administration, then clearly it would be wrong to discriminate against any particular subject area at any particular level of study. Equally clearly (in my view) we cannot assume that, in the case of doctoral level education in practical art & design, ‘research’ must suddenly mean a complete separation of practice and theory.
It must surely be accepted by now that ‘knowledge’ and inquiry exist in many forms, including knowing-through-making, and that it can also be transferred and disseminated in many ways. It is essential to fight back against the idea that knowledge is controlled by theorists who observe, examine and label the work of those who are seen as unthinkingly getting their hands dirty, using their mysteriously God-given skills to create. In my own rather specialised subject area, this tacit assumption has led to a disturbing distortion of ‘knowledge’, understanding and theory-building that is an on going source of concern and amazement to our Masters and PhD students alike.
Don Norman points out that you don’t get given a PhD for producing a wonderful artefact. That is of course correct, but I repeat, knowledge doesn’t only reside in the myriad contradictory things that other people write about that wonderful artefact (for which they can of course all get a PhD). Also frustrating for those of us who studied at art schools is the assumption that meaning is bestowed on the things that we make by decoding them into words. A friend of mine who is a wonderful publisher in Belgium, decided that, in order to be able to publish picturebooks she needed to understand illustration (the language of pictures). So she enrolled at art school and learned to draw, paint, design, think visually and haptically. This is unusual. It takes humility as well as curiosity. My own relatively late experience as an ‘academic’ has been one of doing battle with the tide of advice about how to be more ‘academic’. I wonder how things would be if more academics were dispatched to the studio to expand their knowledge in the manner of my publisher friend? (I could run a module called ‘Drawing as Enquiry’ or ‘The Language of Drawing’).
It appears that there are those on the list who see the PhD as driven primarily by the generation of new and original contributions to knowledge (including myself and, I think, Don Norman) and others (e.g. Ken) who see it primarily as a training in research. The latter is also important but the PhD must surely be more than a self-serving training in how to train more PhD students?
A few weeks ago Elin Olander posted a message to the list asking for examples of PhD research that had directly fed into or benefited practical, professional design outcomes. I was eagerly looking forward to a range of examples but as far as I recall, there was only one response, from Luke Feast, who gave the example of Alvar Aalto’s L-leg stool design from the 1930s. I found myself hoping that the general silence does not indicate a shortage of examples. I wonder though whether an equally pertinent question to Ken’s would be something along the lines of:
“How is the ever increasing volume of ‘traditional’ PhDs in design tangibly benefiting the world and more specifically the world of professional design?”
Another might be:
“As universities increasingly require a PhD qualification as a prerequisite for new appointments (including those in studio art & design) how do we ensure that studio practice is not taught by weak practitioners with PhDs, and ensure that there is not a career hierarchy that privileges theorists and penalises practitioner-tutors?”
But to return to Ken’s original question, the practice-led studio PhD is now well established and has been endlessly discussed on this list. Of course there are variant forms (as was reported as long ago as 2007 in the AHRC Review of Practice-Led Research in Art, Design and Architecture, led by Pr. Chris Rust). It continues to evolve. The example of Nick Sousanis’s graphic novel, ‘Unflattening’ was also discussed at length on this list, culminating in an extremely generous and thoughtful 11000 word email from Ken (more words than in the PhD thesis discussed), which I long hoped to find time to respond to but was ultimately defeated by.
Recent PhDs here at Cambridge School of Art have explored a range of aspects of sequential narrative design that could only have been effectively examined through highly skilled making ('Skill- a word to cause an argument' Frayling) and analysis and which have fed directly into the commercial design world in the form of partial outcomes that are published in numerous languages and that widely influence design and publishing practice. These are not only peer reviewed in the academic context but in the highly competitive commercial publishing context too (i.e. they have to be good to be published). They are beginning to fill a substantial gap in knowledge.
I have no idea how many actual designers subscribe to this list but my perception is that they are in the minority. I know that many of our PhD students have felt reluctant to contribute to this list, feeling (ironically) like outsiders as practitioners. And many feel that there is hostility towards the idea of research through design. The frustration that practitioner-academics feel in the face of what one might call a ‘drawbridge mentality’ and perceived vested interests is substantial.
So I feel the need to turn the original question back to Ken- what do YOU think is the best way to continue to build doctoral education from studio-based design education? I am assuming that you do feel that change is important here, so no need to restate description of what a PhD ‘is’.
Best wishes,
Martin
Professor Martin Salisbury
Course Leader, MA Children's Book Illustration
Director, The Centre for Children's Book Studies
Cambridge School of Art
0845 196 2351
[log in to unmask]
http://www.cambridgemashow.com
http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/microsites/ccbs.html
________________________________________
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Eduardo A. Corte-Real [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2017 10:25 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Fwd: Doctoral education, the academies
<http://www.iade.pt/>
--
Please click here to view our e-mail disclaimer http://www.anglia.ac.uk/email-disclaimer
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
