Dear Luke,

Thanks for your excellent first post and the further conversation. I’ve been tinkering with thoughts since your first note, but I haven’t yet posted. Some of my thoughts are here. 

One unstated problem occurs to me. The subject header asks, “Are the aims of doctoral education in design compatible?” The thread begins by proposing three arguments for higher education: knowledge, individual development, socialisation. These aren’t specific to doctoral education.

These are general goals of universities and higher education. 

But the goal of knowledge actually has two focal points. There may be more than two, but there are at least two, and they contradict one another to some degree:

1) Creating new knowledge,
2) Preserving existing knowledge

These are institutional goals serving society as a whole. 

There are also two goals involving socialisation and professional training. These are somewhat more difficult, as one involves individual career development and private opportunity as well as serving the public need for professionals to carry out many kinds of work. This only partly involves socialisation. The second goal involves socialisation in the sense of your third goal. These goals contain some degree of incompatibility:

1) Training specialists,
2) Educating citizens

These four goals contain several forms of inherent tension. The requirements of new knowledge demand a foundation in earlier knowledge and push the boundaries of what is known. This means negotiating a delicate series of forces that draw the past into the future. At some moments, the need for preservation emphasises the past, and the love of the past often involves a tendency to preserve the past intact. At other times, the need for new knowledge can apparently overwhelm the past, and those who move forward sometimes care little for what we have known as societies and as individuals.

The first institutions of higher learning — predecessors of the modern university — were imperial and religious centres of specialised education. These were created in vastly hierarchical societies where a limited few knowledge specialists served even fewer great lords and potentates. All of them ruled or helped to govern and administer a vast and oppressed majority with little thought for service to the whole.

The Greek ideal of democracy brought with it a new kind of higher learning: education for the wise exercise of civic responsibility. However, this was not
democracy as we know it. Only a few, wealthy citizens could afford this education, and only a few more were entitled to vote in societies that depended in great part on slave labor and the subjugation of smaller and less powerful city-states to the great powers of classical Greece.

The tension between education for the few and education for an increasingly large many has been a pendulum driving the growth and spread of education from the first days to our own time.

The two polarities of knowledge and citizenship also establish a subtle dimension of opposing and cooperating tendencies. Professions require specialisation and the preservation of a coherent body of knowledge. This cements professional engagement and permits the development of practical affairs. At the same time, all professions require new knowledge to improve and grow. This demands research and a challenge to what is known. This challenge in itself can weaken the professional sodality while strengthening the profession in the long term.

Professions are by nature inclined in two directions. In one direction, they serve the larger polity. Most professions are granted specific ranges of control
and social status precisely because they serve the larger polity. All professionals are in one sense citizens who act on behalf of the larger society. At the same time, the privileges and opportunities that drive professional development set professional at odds with fellow citizens outside a specific professional group. Professional training always involves socialisation for professional membership. And most professionals tend to serve the professional sodality rather than the larger community.   

A diagram of the relationships among the four goals demonstrates a series of conflicting and communicating forces that operate in an energising dialectic. At each step, we see tensions between specialisation and generalisation, between theory and practice, between research and repetition, between hierarchy and democracy, between the pull of the past and the press of the future.

Many universities and most design schools focus on professional skills. While you mentioned Stephen Allard’s paper in terms of socialisation, his focus is undergraduate and possibly master’s level professional education. He does not address doctoral education at all. To the degree that his concepts involve socialisation, this is socialisation into the profession, not socialisation for civic service.

In addition, many universities now have functions that are mandated or imposed on them by government or educational funding agencies. These may overlap or conflict with the other goals in different ways. They include training for specific jobs, retraining for new jobs or for new job functions, training for professional careers, career development and renewal, and lifelong learning. There is another goal for much higher education today — credentials. To speak of credentials is not necessarily to speak of content — it often means merely to have a degree that will entitle certain people to embark on privileged careers. This is visible among the children of wealthy and privileged parents, for whom a bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree permits entry to a career in banking, entertainment, politics, some kinds of consulting, or other fields where the content of an education is less relevant than personal connections or family connections. In the United States, a bachelor’s degree or a master's from an Ivy League university often serves this purpose. Some Oxbridge degrees in the UK have the same function. 

At this point, let me move from the general purpose of the university to the goals of doctoral education in general. There are several possible goals for doctoral education. One is research training — training the doctoral candidate to engage in research. Another is advanced professional training for certain kinds of doctoral degrees. Yet another involves staffing funded research programs — while this may not be a legitimate goal for PhD candidates, it is sometimes a goal of researchers or of universities when they secure funding. Finally, credentials also play a role. In many systems, a PhD permits one to advance from one faculty rank to another. In some nations, job conditions are such that one achieves the equivalent of tenure after a specific amount of time in a university position. However, one requires a PhD to rise in rank and salary — or to qualify for certain roles. Therefore, people sometimes seek a convenient PhD without respect to the content of the PhD. Much like an Ivy League bachelor’s degree for a banker, the PhD may simply be a credential for some people who wish to rise within the university system.  

Many argue that one purpose of the PhD in design is to contribute to improvements in professional practice. Some argue that this contribution should serve the field as a whole. Others argue that the primary purpose is to develop the researcher who can integrate research into professional design practice. (This latter goal is also central to professional doctorates.)

It seems to me that there are several overlapping sets of goals for higher education and universities, for doctoral education, and for doctoral education in design. Some of these goals work together. Some are incompatible. This is not a comprehensive list — it may serve to advance the discussion. At any rate, I’m posting it now while the thread remain in people’s minds. 

1) Goals for higher education

1.1 developing knowledge
1.2 preserving knowledge
1.3 developing civic responsibility
1.4 developing general skills (f.ex., analysis, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, languages)
1.5 developing background knowledge for contemporary life (f.ex., history, natural science, philosophy, literature)  
1.6 training for jobs
1.7 retraining for new jobs or for new job functions
1.8 training for professional careers
1.9 developing professional skills
1.10 career development and career renewal 
1.11 lifelong learning
1.12 credentials.

2) Goals for doctoral education

2.1 research training
2.2 advanced professional training (professional doctorate)
2.3 research training and advanced professional training in some fields (f.ex., engineering) 
2.4 staffing funded research programs 
2.5 credentials for career advancement within universities
2.6 credentials for career advancement in such fields as politics, law, or consulting in some nations 

3) Goals for doctoral education in design

3.1 research training
3.2 advanced professional training (professional doctorate)
3.3 research training and advanced professional training in some design fields (f.ex., HCI, engineering design, design psychology, etc.) 
3.4 staffing funded research programs 
3.5 credentials for career advancement within universities
3.6 research for improvements to professional practice for the design field 
3.7 develop designers who can integrate research into professional design practice 

There is certainly more to be said on these topics, and many ways to look at them. I’ll stop here, and I will recommend a current article that discusses several aspects of the PhD. This is an article by Susan Hagan and Deirdre Barron in the current issue of She Ji. It is an in-depth review of the book Practice-Based Design Research. You can download it from URL:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2018.12.001 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2018.12.001>

A while back, Peter Murphy also discussed aspects of the PhD in an article titled “Design Research: Aesthetic Epistemology and Explanatory Knowledge.” Murphy — currently a professor at LaTrobe University — was formerly Head of School for design and the creative arts at James Cook University. You can download it from URL:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.09.002 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.09.002>

Thanks again for initiating this thread. Hope my reply is not too late to be useful.

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | 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 

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Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | 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 







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