Dear list members,
I always admire the well-considered posts on this list. Please forgive me
if
this post is less well worded. I completed a PhD in early 2003 and will
give a brief account of it, before raising some points about the perils of
getting a PhD. I timed myself reading it out loud, hopefully the PhD
description should take no more than about three minutes to read. And
maybe it'll come handy yet as a pitch...
Richard Buchanan and others started the thread on PhDs by asking
about possible themes or categorizations. I've heard of quite a few
design-related PhDs that take on the character of a personal journey and
touch on philosophical issues on the way. Speaking for myself, I was 'an
ordinary designer' when I started the PhD. Many philosophical issues
were way above my station. A lot still are even now. I started the PhD
with some qualitative fieldwork (interviewing, observation, concept
generation with users) and some design work in the domain of user-
centred design. I came to reflect on the activities that I had carried
out,
absorbing literature by and around Schön (Reflective Practice). The
Grounded Theory approach I had initially adopted for analysis (and used
by many design researchers) I found to be insufficient in reflecting on
how I had made sense of the knowledge gained from user research, and
how I had used that knowledge. My recognition was that when I
research for my own designing, I cannot just present apparently neutral,
'true' results. This is because of the teleological nature of design
(Dorst,
1997), wanting to change things, which has also come into focus on this
list recently. This recognition led me in the reflection to draw on work
mainly by and around Deleuze, because it expounds how desire is
inherent to the drive to want to make or change something (he discussed
it in the context of making art), and that this desire is connected to
experiencing living - being physically affected by it. My resulting
'contribution to knowledge' in the thesis was a metaphoric description
of how, as a designer, one could expose oneself to situations of product
use, thus becoming able to acquire (tacit) knowledge through
experience. Doing this could help a designer in designing with a user-
centred focus.
Here's another story that is related more to the getting of a PhD
than to the content of one, but also touches on the way design research
can
come to sit uneasily between disciplines. My thesis defence was pretty
tough because one of the examiners was an expert on Deleuze. He
couldn't accept that the thesis was seeking to make a contribution to
knowledge
in design, and specifically user-centered design, rather than another
domain
such as philosophy or art. I do wonder how often other PhD candidates
encounter similar problems. The conflict could have been avoided by not
inviting an expert on Deleuze who was protective of this philosophy.
That is straightforward advice that can be read up in "How to get a
PhD". However, it may not always be easy at present to find suitable
examiners with a design research orientation and/or sufficient flexibility
of mind.
Generally, a much safer way to PhD success seems to be to limit one's
field of view to a very narrow one, do some experiments, present the
results in tables and then maybe compare a few hypotheses made earlier.
(Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that that is too easy!) Maybe this
story touches on problems of legitimation of the multi- and inter-
disciplinary studies that I think quite a few design researchers are
involved in.
Regards,
Stella.
Deleuze, Gilles (1997). Essays: critical and clinical. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. Original Critique et Clinique, 1993. Paris:
Les Editions de Minuit.
Dorst, Kees (1997). Describing Design. A comparison of paradigms. PhD
thesis, Delft, The Netherlands: Technical University of Delft. (I think
Dorst also wrote a paper in Design Studies on this topic)
Glaser, Barney G. and Anselm L. Strauss (1967). The discovery of
grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. Chicago:
Aldine Pub. Co.
Phillips, Estelle and Derek S.Pugh (2000). How to get a PhD: A
handbook for students and their supervisors. 3rd edn.
Buckinghamshire: Open University Press.
Schön, Donald A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner. How
Professionals Think in Action. U.S.: Basic Books.
--
Stella Boess
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering
Delft University of Technology
www.io.tudelft.nl/research/ergonomics/AED
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