Friends,
The current thread on the structure of the practice-based PhD opens new
territory that is well worth considering. I was especially interested in
Lubomir’s comments – and in Terry’s. The improvements to design
practice as a result of research is often overlooked.
Research issues and what we learn from systematic research slowly
improve professional practice in most fields. Progress is often slow.
There is a usually a time lag – Buckminster Fuller used twenty-five
years as his rule of thumb. Practitioners often grumble that research is
useless or irrelevant – 19th century physicians certainly did, and so
did engineers and computer scientists after them. These days, it is
apparently time for designers to complain the research is useless or
irrelevant. The problem we face is that gains are slow, and they are
often embedded in specific fields or even minor subdisciplines, whereas
the idea of research crosses the whole field.
Earlier in this thread, I mentioned the online workshop that Chris Rust
convened in 2006. The workshop addressed many of the issues we are
considering here. You can find the entire workshop at:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/AHRC-WORKSHOP-PL.html
While some new ideas have occurred here, I have the feeling that some
old ground is worth covering, if only because our community has grown
enough in recent years that some people might not have had an
opportunity to consider these issues in an organized way.
Because Chris helped to guide the conversation into useful threads, I
am going to use the categories that I used for my five summaries for the
UK AHRC Practice-Led Review Conference.
To make for easy reading and to keep each post to a reasonable length,
the summaries follow in five individual posts.
Summary 1: Being Academic
Summary 2: Research
Summary 3: The PhD Degree
Summary 4: Research
Summary 5: Practice-Led Research
Because research is in great part an academic enterprise, and because
many of us work in universities, I am also preserving the first summary
on the nature of life and work as an academic.
These appear as first posted, with a few minor changes to correct
errors, and an update to my new, Ozzified sig.
Best regards,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean
Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
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