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PHD-DESIGN  December 2017

PHD-DESIGN December 2017

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Subject:

Re: What is a PhD...curriculum?

From:

Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Fri, 29 Dec 2017 19:20:10 +0100

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Dear Gunnar,

There is nothing curious about the nature of the PhD system. A PhD degree is the certification that one has mastered the skills of research, and that one is fitted to enter the guild of masters and scholars.

Just as ancient craft guilds required that an apprentice demonstrate the knowledge of the field by creating a journeyman piece, so apprentice researchers demonstrate their capacity to engage in research by producing a journeyman work: a PhD thesis that shows the ability to engage in original research.

In most guilds, the step from journeyman to master involved taking responsibility for all the affairs of the guild, and it involved taking responsibility for the future of the guild in training apprentices.  

One well known guild oath explains this. This tradition was embedded in the original Hippocratic Oath that physicians take: 

“I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfill according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant:

“To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art—if they desire to learn it—without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken an oath according to the medical law, but no one else.”

The issue is not quite as you state it. You wrote, “Research training and disciplinary knowledge are seemingly useless unless coupled with the ability to confer different research and disciplinary knowledge on the next generation.” Not so.

What is important is that to be a full member of any guild, you must have the ability to transmit knowledge to the next generation. As a full member in any guild, you embody the knowledge of the field. If you choose not to share that knowledge and you choose not to take apprentices, this is your choice. If you do choose to take students, you must be able to teach them.

Among my interesting relatives, one is a distinguished physician and medical researcher. After working with two of the world’s leading researchers in his branch of medicine, he wrote what became the standard textbook in his field. After a long career, he shifted from research and education to a private practice. At that point, he stopped teaching — though he still lectures at universities around the world. Now, I’ve discovered that he has changed careers yet again — using his research skills very successfully in an area far from medicine.

If you get a PhD in design and prefer to work in professional practice — or you manage the design division of a corporation or you move into general management to run the corporation itself, that’s your choice. That’s also the case for a physician who might choose to do pharmaceutical research or research in prosthetics before moving over to management to run a pharmaceutical company or a high-tech prosthetics firm — or perhaps to run a hospital or to work in management at the World Health Organization. 

What’s up with being able to transmit your knowledge to the next generation applies to those who prefer to work in the context of the university. If you work exclusively in a lab, perhaps you won’t transit your knowledge. If, however, you do want to teach people to do research, one purpose of the PhD is to demonstrate that you have the skills to do so.

The PhD is *not* a license to teach undergraduates. It is the business of each university to ensure that it hires people with the skills required for the teaching they are hired to do. 

Some research universities have decided that they want all their teachers to hold a PhD so that every member of the academic staff can *both* teach research students *and* undergraduates. This requires is a level of professional responsibility with respect to claims of teaching competence and to assignments. 

I can teach organization theory and organization design to undergraduates. In today’s world, this is what Richard Buchanan described as fourth-order design. Most design schools do not teach fourth-order design — they lack the range of staff with appropriate skills to offer such a program. People who teach organization design generally work at business schools and management schools, as well as in schools of political science, government, and occasionally law. 

Interestingly, I once held the position of dean at a design school where we offered many subjects that I cannot myself teach. I understood how to evaluate and work with people who taught those subjects. My Vice Chancellor required that I hire only people with a PhD. As a result, I hired people with research skills *and* studio skills. Not all of those people did their research in the topic of their studio teaching. (For many years, I was a professor at the Norwegian School of Management. We had no design program, even though I was deeply engaged in design research. So I also did research in a subject that I did not teach.)

I hope this explains the two issues you find curious.

One purpose of the PhD curriculum is to help students develop skills. Some of those skills enable PhD students to become the kind of people who later take responsibility for the discipline or field in which they earn a PhD. This is a tradition embedded in the development of research education and the research university since the dawn of the earliest Western universities — the guilds or corporations of masters and scholars. This tradition is embedded even more deeply in professional education, dating back to the medical training program established by Hippocrates of Kos in the fifth century BC.

The second issue is simply a matter of where people teach. The PhD is not a license to teach undergraduates, though some universities make it a requirement for hiring undergraduate teachers. Once government policy in most nations of the world began to shift design education from independent design schools into research universities, some aspects of design education were governed by general university policy. Some universities require every member of the tenured staff or every member of the tenure-track staff to hold a PhD. Other universities establish different standards for professional education. In those universities, someone without a PhD who designed cars for Toyota or iPhones for Apple might be preferred to a less experienced designer with a solid research education. That’s a matter of university policy, not a matter of the PhD. 

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn 

--

Gunnar Swanson wrote:

—snip—

While I do not disagree with most of what you wrote, I find two things curious.

The first is that you define a PhD degree in terms of a self-perpetuating system. It is interesting that the use for PhD degree seems to be the ability to allow others to get a PhD degree. Research training and disciplinary knowledge are seemingly useless unless coupled with the ability to confer different research and disciplinary knowledge on the next generation. What's up with that?

The second is that the PhD is a license to teach not just PhD students but undergraduates. And not just research but the non-research part of the ostensible subject matter. If this implied licensing is the worry, shouldn’t we fear a PhD degree in design given to a researcher who is not qualified to teach how to do design? After all, many more design professors will spend much more time teaching people who want to be designers rather than researchers.

—snip—


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