Hi Nigel,
I'm puzzled by the tone of your post, and of some of the content.
You seem to be misrepresenting what I wrote. Please read again.
I think it is clear that on some fronts things have improved in PhD research and theses worldwide. In other ways many PhDs and other post-graduate theses are of a lower quality than in the past. On my bookshelf I've a 30 year old 3 year MSc thesis in Education from a colleague that is tightly argued and of evidenced research on team teaching and is over 80,000 words in length. At that time a PhD was expected to be even more tightly reasoned and of around 150,000 words.
A general picture, agreed by many, seems to be that PhD research and thesis quality in most cases depends on good research training, good supervision and careful choice of candidates.
Good research training nowadays is typically regarded (in Humanities in the UK at least) to require a year of dedicated full time education post-honours. The basic standard of good PhD supervision typically requires PhD supervisors to have a PhD and an apprenticeship of being a secondary supervisor on several PhDs. Good choice of candidate typically involves the candidate to have significant research experience and to be able to demonstrate strength in thinking, research and critical analysis, theory development and writing skills.
20 years ago PhDs in Art and Design began to be undertaken just after Art and Design Schools were integrated into universities and in that context very little of the above applied.
From my observations at that time in the UK and Australia, many Art and Design PhD candidates were supervised by staff who themselves had not undertaken PhDs, who did not have research training and had little or no research experience. In terms of developing quality PhD outcomes this was problematic. Also problematic was that PhD candidates did not receive formal research training and PhD students were often chosen on the basis of their artistic/design outputs rather than their research and theory skills.
From that, my personal observation and that of many others, including too many on this list to name, was that, at that time, PhDs in Art and Design were in general problematic in process and quality (e.g. see discussions on this list and the DRS list 1998-2003). Those discussing those issues were concerned enough to call and present at the Ohio Conference and the La Clusaz conference and to initiate the discussions on PhDs on the DRS list and then to create this phd-design list.
In my earlier post, I was commenting about that era when I wrote that many PhDs in Design at that time were of a god-awful standard. This was in comparison to the quality they could be themselves rather than comparison with PhDs in other areas. From observation and marking PhDs some still have problems.
The problems of PhD quality at that time and before were not restricted to PhDs in Art and Design. PhDs in many disciplines suffered some problems but typically to a lesser extent. For example, in the UK, PhDs in many fields had not yet adopted a formal research training year prior to undertaking the PhD research proper. This requirement for a research training year occurred more widely after the start of the Blair Labour government as a result of concern by government about the relative uselessness of Humanities PhDs.
In engineering and many other technical disciplines, mathematically-based PhDs could get by without much research training. My own PhD research (1992-1998) , however, focused on how social, ethical and environmental factors could be integrated with mathematically and technical design activity - hardly an Engineering PhD. The institutional weaknesses in PhD support for these kinds of multi-discipline engineering/design PhDs was and remains problematic. My own PhD could have been better. A simple example: in mathematically-based engineering PhDs, it is sufficient to cite research papers and books without page numbers - it is assumed they are part of the relatively small corpus of books and articles on the research topic that the candidate and an appropriate examiner would know intimately. This convention is found in most engineering research and I followed it. It was unhelpful - a broader-based engineering PhD that includes other disciplines requires an academic habit of referencing page numbers (my thanks to Ken for pointing this out and reminding me).
More recently, from my marking of many PhD theses, it is clear that standards and quality of Design PhDs have improved . It is also clear, however, that the scale and complexity of PhDs and theses have reduced. This is not a bad thing. PhDs 2-3 decades ago were typically 120-150,000 words and a lot of the research effort of candidates was in managing such big documents. The difficulty in dealing with the complexity goes up exponentially with the size and this delays PhD completion. The reduction in complexity and timeliness of completion are real benefits of shorter 75,000 word PhDs. Examiners also seem to prefer marking a 75,000 word concise and well-structured research report compared to a 150,000 word complex document 😉
What seems clear (at least to me) looking historically across conferences, journals and books is that a lot has been achieved in design research since the 1960s but quality and benefit has been variable.
There has been a lot of wow, and a lot of hmm that is already developed and developed earlier and better in other disciplines, and some that one wonders why some better topic wasn't chosen. This is much the same in many disciplines. However, much of the beneficial outcome in the design research literature is the result of the PhDs that have been undertaken in that time.
If one asks could things be, and have been, better in design research and design PhDs. The answer, I suggest is yes.
More funding for research training for PhD candidates and supervisors would probably help. As would more critical judgement about the quality of books advising on how to do a PhD in design and increased care to choose PhD topics that are both valuable and will build the theory foundation of the field.
Personally, for the future I'd like to see more use of higher-level mathematical skills in design research and in theses of design PhD students (but that is just my view 😉 ). I think adding the dimension of high-level mathematics would be helpful and move the design research field forward faster on many different pathways.
Best wishes,
Terry
==
Dr Terence Love,
School of Design and Built Environment, Curtin University, Western Australia
CEO, Design Out Crime and CPTED Centre
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks, Western Australia 6030
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+61 (0)4 3497 5848
ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
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-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Nigel Cross
Sent: Thursday, 14 February 2019 1:19 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: On the History of the List
So, after 20 years of assisting researchers and research students in the discussion of 'PhD studies and related research in design', what might be some conclusions on the current state of the art?
According to Keith Russell, the whole "project" of building an academic discipline in design has failed, and it may even have contributed to the (pernicious, destructive) "feminisation" of universities.
According to Terry Love, the "God-awful standard" of PhDs in "Art and Design" (whatever that might be) still persists, because those PhDs simply don't match up to the more holy standard of PhDs in Engineering Design (which is the type that Terry has).
I'm puzzled by the negativity of their assessments, but I'm not really qualified to comment any further here, because, as Terry pointed out to me recently, I have contributed only 33 posts to the list, whereas the "active members" have each contributed "more than 50 times that". To have made more than 1650 posts each over 20 years, I think he must be referring to the small number of such contributors who have so consistently assisted the discussion and therefore have been so influential in achieving the current state of the art as Keith and Terry perceive it.
Nigel Cross
Emeritus Professor of Design Studies, The Open University, UK.
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