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Having thought that my original thread on ‘PhD supervision as a research method’ had died its death, I’m delighted to see that it’s resurfaced, albeit in a slightly different form. Terry's reference to "if things are so good then how come they are so bad?" leads me add my firm belief in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Maybe I’m an eternal optimist but, with the exception of being witness to some examples of ‘bad’ professional practice in PhD’s (see previous related thread) I think that, in general, PhD’s in design are in pretty good shape. A major source of uncertainty appears to arise from the contribution of practice as a research method but, thanks to action research, this fits quite naturally amongst the wide range of methods available to the researcher. David’s summary of a typical structure of a thesis in the Arts and Humanities was spot on when he cited the following elements: - Context and problems - Establishing prior art and what is happening now (literature review); - Research design (how I will do it) - Research project (survey or whatever) - Analysis - Coming to some conclusions (including explaining clearly what is the contribution to knowledge and limits to the work) Using this structure, the practice component can be readily integrated into the research project (if appropriate) which enables things to be discovered that were previously unknown. It inevitably takes a fair few words to articulate what’s been undertaken during these seven (or so) elements and I find it completely reasonable for a PhD that includes practice to be of a similar length to one that uses other data collection methods, with 40000 to 60000 words appearing to be the going rate. I’d love to think that the a picture paints a thousand words and a prototype paints a thousand pictures but, for reasons well articulated in subsequent responses, the thinking behind the practice component needs to be justified and described and the most effective way to do that is through words (supported by figures/tables). Chris’ justification of the need for supporting written discourse in the case of an engineering PhD that included practice makes perfect sense and readily transposes to design. I see an opportunity for a web site with a few case studies here………..