Dear Martin,

Your note got me thinking.

Look, got to say that these issues are quite vexed, and they require a
careful sorting through. I'm not going to put all my thoughts forward
right
now, but I do want to add two points.

First, I intended my reply playfully but not scornfully. Or at least,
I
intend no scorn for those who treat this in a serious way. I do
maintain a
touch of scorn for those who do not recognize the serious and
difficult
challenges that this poses, and that is not entirely uncommon even
now.

You noted that a degree in advanced professional practice is considered
a
second-rate degree in the UK. If so, I'd argue that this view is the
problem, not the notion of a degree in advanced professional practice.

I had an uncle, now dead, who was a medical practitioner of some
distinction, an MD, a fellow of one or another of those colleges that
distinguished physicians and surgeons belong to, and a sometimes
teacher of
professional practice at a leading medical school. At one point in his
career, a bit like David, he decided to become a researcher. He went
back to
university to acquire a PhD, the degree for research. No one thought it
odd.

Interestingly, his son -- my cousin -- also became a professor of
medicine,
a pioneer in an area of medical practice, and the author of the
leading
textbook in the field. Oddly, he never got a PhD -- never asked him why
not.

But there are reasons for both kinds of degrees.

The second note is that I was thinking on this notion after I posted,
and I
have to say that I began to think of it as a thought experiment. I
just
might give it a try to see what happens, especially given that my art
practice is reasonably distinct from what I do in design and design
research, though some of the concepts and practices overlap.

As I started to think it through, I realized that clarifying the
issues,
sorting them, registering them, finding a voice, and examining the
concepts
and notions would be a significant challenge with a series of
subsidiary
challenges along the way. This is exactly why a true practice-led PhD
is far
more difficult than many practitioners realize -- quite distinct from
and
more difficult than a doctorate in advanced professional practice. I am
not
suggesting that a DA or a DFA is second rate, but I am indeed stating
with
no trace of scorn that a true PhD involving the professional practice
of art
or design is a different issue entirely, and it requires several skill
sets.

You are right in stating that mathematicians and physicists do a great
deal
with numbers -- those numbers codify centuries of practice, explicitly
codified with agreed meanings, often linked by words. The meanings
captured
in physical equations or maths formulas are common to all who use
those
numbers, as common as words are to psychologists or historians. They
bear
traces of a hundred agreed conventions, and they are demonstrations of
common understandings in a rigorously structured language that means
the
same thing to all who speak.

This is not true of art or design, and thus it is impossible to
compare
planning objects or drafting to maths or physics. A physical formula
means
the same thing to all, or can be made to mean so with a few postulates
and
technical clarifications. This can never be the case for an object
embedded
in cultures, practices, and layers of unstated conventions.

I will agree that mathematics or physics are culturally embedded, as
are
their practice, but it is a different kind of embedment and a
different
embodiment and embodied practice, much more susceptible to
clarification.
Unless, of course, we are discussing the anthropology and meaning of
the
mathematics of a culture -- but that is not doing maths, it is
studying
maths and how maths means.

There is much more to this than meets the eye. And here I shall stop
for now.

Warm wishes,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:19:58 +0100, Salisbury, Martin
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Ken Friedman describes a practice-led PhD in terms of “inquiring
into issues
>related to creative practice and partly using the results of creative
>practice as evidence for an argument.” He asserts that, “The
enquiry and the
>argument must be made in words.” He continues, “* the whole itself
must take
>some kind of “logic-based structure.” At least it must be so
unless we
>actually give a PhD for creative practice itself.” A little
scornfully
>perhaps, he adds, “If there is a university out there that does
this, please
>let me know.”