Dear Paul,
Please permit me to give my answer to the question you raise: “Is this not just a rehash of 'the difference between a PhD and a DDes' discussion which has been had on the list several times over the past 20+ years?”
While this addresses some of the same questions, this is not simply a rehash. Don makes a few crisp, elegant points that haven’t been stated in exactly the same way.
Beyond this, it is not “just a rehash of the 'Research about/through/for Design’ subject.”
Much of that discussion has been clumsy and misunderstood ever since it first came up in Christopher Frayling’s (1993) pamphlet. Frayling loosely based his notion on Herbert’s Read’s (1944, 1974) concepts of teaching through art and teaching to art. But he overlooked the crucial fact that Read is describing education and learning rather than research. Rather than explain what people so often miss in discussing the notion of research about, through, or for design, I attach an article (Friedman 2008) in which I discuss the issues carefully. (I got the prepositions wrong, stating them as into, by, and for. I must have been half asleep when I was proofreading. The key concepts are in order.)
The most important fact of this thread is that this thread is not about different concepts of design research. Luke Feast started this thread with a specific question on fatal flaws in PhD degree projects. This doesn’t focus on the difference between the PhD and DDes and it doesn’t discuss kinds of research.
Luke specifically asked us to examine the kinds of problems that damage a PhD thesis in such a way that the thesis is doomed to fail. While the replies touch on issues that have come up before on the PhD-Design list, I don’t recall that anyone asked that specific question to set the frame of a conversation. It’s probably useful to examine old topics again from time to time to see if we’ve thought things through in a better or more articulate way. In this case, though, the specific questions seems to have been a first.
Ken Friedman
Frayling, Christopher. 1993. Research in Art and Design. RCA Research Papers, 1: 1, London: Royal College of Art.
Friedman, Ken. 2008. “Research into, by, and for design.” Journal of Visual Arts Practice, Vol. 7, No. 2, doi: 10.1386/jvap.7.2.153/1
Read, Herbert. 1944. Education through Art. London: Faber and Faber.
Read, Herbert. 1974. Education through Art, 3rd rev. edn. New York: Pantheon Books.
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