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Will Stahl-Timmins wrote: > I asked one of my supervisors last night, over a few drinks, whether I > could submit my thesis in the form of 55 000 really small, but very > pretty pictures, instead of the corresponding number of words, but he > didn't seem overly impressed with the idea. At the risk of introducing a serious note, I feel most protagonists of the artefact as thesis have suffered from too-high expectations. It may be that, in some future world we can hardly imagine, scientists might regularly dance their theses but meanwhile we have questions like Will's that will not be answered by a wholesale overturning of the submission rules but by looking to see how we can usefully advance our practices. The most important thing is that individual students can invent a whole body of new research practices on their own but their projects provide useful vehicles for they and their supervisors to collaborate in nudging the state of the art along. I'm lucky to have involved in a thesis (Graham Whiteley, 2000) that consists of, in my quick estimation, around 750 small but very informative drawings and photographs, arranged as a narrative of the work, and occupying roughly half the surface area of the thesis, alongside a text that is tied tightly to the sets of images. As I've explained before (Rust & Wilson, 2001), the assembly of those images into mini-narrative sets was the central part of the work of constructing the thesis, the text flowed quite naturally on from that. I've seen a Design Management thesis where the core work of constructing and evaluating a set of operational principles was done through a sketchbook activity and although the sketches were not a huge part of the physical thesis their presence was an essential part of the story, showing thinking in action as well as an audit trail that connected the original concept with the refined final version. Some universities are rather backward in this respect. University of Cambridge allows practical material, such as videos or computer software, to be included in the appendices of a thesis but does not allow the candidate to include references to that work in the main text. I'm pleased to say that my own university has always been open to sensible arguments to vary the format of the thesis and a allow practical material to be represented in ways that support comprehension of the research, I hope to be announcing a particularly good example of that in a little while. Finally, Will's 55,000 pictures will not be necessary unless he is intending to reproduce the kind of narrowly symbolic pictographic language (diagrammatic picture of a hand means "hand") that ancient civilisations used as a bridge between rich illustrations and today's compact written languages. A good image will convey a rich set of information, ideas or experiences. Maybe we need some research into whether a picture is really worth 1000 words, 55 images can do a lot of work but we need to know with precision if the PhD regulations depend on it. Best wishes from Sheffield Chris RUST, C. WILSON, A (2001) A Visual Thesis? Techniques for Reporting Practice-Led Research Proceedings of the 4th European Academy of Design Conference, Aveiro, Portugal, April 2001 68-72, available online at http://www.chrisrust.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/academic/abstracts/aveiro.htm WHITELEY,G. (2000) An Articulated Skeletal Analogy of the Human Upper Limb, PhD thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, available online at http://www.chrisrust.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/academic/resources/whiteley.htm