Thanks to Owain for helping me take off my blinkers and to Gunnar for two more examples of “the horror.........”
I’ve seen, supervised and examined many PhD’s that use practice to develop and evaluate tools/methods that aim to enhance practice. I am largely unfamiliar with theses that Owain describes as leading to, “an examination of the outcomes of design practice (as artifacts, plans, proposals, visuals, animations, prototypes etc.), with less or perhaps even no regard for the path taken to get to those outcomes”. I am also aware of theses that are little more than documented histories of commercial practice which fall well short of what is expected of a PhD (more horror!).
I agree with Owain’s comment that “if the designed product or final outcome is worthy and demonstrably useful to answering the researcher's questions, we don't necessarily need to worry about the credentials of the designer”. But this of course depends on the nature of the research questions. If attempting to make generalisations from designed outcomes that are of relevance to the practitioner community, then I believe that the fitness to practice issue remains. But yes, there will always be exceptions.
Having raised the issue of PhD supervision before Christmas and now explored the capability of researchers as designers, I feel that there is an opportunity and need to collate examples of best practice from recently completed PhD’s that include visually creative researcher practice as a method of data collection. I will therefore be preparing a call for contributions for a forthcoming publication/resource that will provide a case studies for future researchers and supervisors. Watch this space………
Mark Evans
Loughborough Design School
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