I second this analysis.
There is a great deal of discussion here — much of it I have found very disheartening — about what research is, and whether design doctoral students should be held to some familiar standards (yes, they should). I see a worrying attempt to both appropriate the term "research" while trying to redefine its elements to accommodate only what designers do, or worse, want to do.
Sticking with the Greeks for a second (and please do read "The Legacy of Greek Philosophy" by Bernard Williams, which began like this: "The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy"), Aristotle's On Rhetoric was about how to make arguments. Not those that the sophists made, but good ones. Ones that had virtue and therefore could help lead the assembly to virtuous conduct.
Our doctoral students today, across the spectrum of disciplines (all of which are under 200 years old), will be called on in professional life, and expected through public expectation, to be able to make better arguments. Better claims about the veracity of other claims. Be able to reflect on practice and provide insight into its conduct. Whether this is a Ph.D. in literature, or art history, or political science or physics, I strongly suggest that this statement remains the same.
If design students do not master the fundamental skills needed to differentiate good arguments from bad ones (and yes, this is about METHOD), then they have not mastered the skills worthy of the title, "doctor of philosophy."
No one can answer every question. But the reason why well trained scholars (and it is a form of training) can read work outside their immediate field and see errors (if not always omissions) is because they have some basic training in how arguments are constructed and help together or undermined.
A Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) is an outstanding degree by and for practitioners. I have a BA from Sarah Lawrence College — a brilliant school and perhaps the best I attended, which included Georgetown and two schools at Oxford as well. Poets were taught by poets, and novelists by other novelists. These people did NOT necessarily have a Ph.D., and one would have been useless. That wasn't the task. And those who did have a Ph.D. in literature taught the history, structure, form and meaning of books, genres, and epochs. They didn't even try to reach how to write a good story.
If design Ph.Ds can't do what I need them to do as Director of The Policy Lab, I — and many others — will not turn to your students with our questions. We'll go to better scholars. You will position yourself in the world of your own making.
I strongly recommended you don't turn the design doctorate into a source of ridicule. If you want Ph.Ds and not (only) MFAs, then its time to ante up. The arguments I've read here about practice-as-research are now — 12 months into reading this list — utterly unconvincing to me. Practice can lead to learning. Not to "research" unless one aims to study the learning itself.
And a list serve, by the way, should NOT be the place where these issues are settled. These discussions are like pub conversations AFTER work in London. Fun, stimulating, and helpful to direct the mind towards things, but proof of nothing and not the place or space to make decisions about higher education.
Derek Miller
_________________
Dr. Derek B. Miller
Director
The Policy Lab
321 Columbus Ave.
Seventh Floor of the Electric Carriage House
Boston, MA 02116
United States of America
Phone
+1 617 440 4409
Twitter
@Policylabtweets
Web
www.thepolicylab.org
This e-mail includes proprietary and confidential information belonging to The Policy Lab, Ltd. All rights reserved.
On Oct 14, 2011, at 1:49 AM, Ken Friedman wrote:
> Dear Eduardo,
>
> Not joking at all. This was Plato's view.
>
> Plato would have understood the university as an academy because the university curriclum resembled Plato's own curriculum. This is especially true of the medieval universities where the lower faculties taught the trivium and the quadrivium.
>
> Plato would not have understood the art academies as academies in his sense of the word. The practical arts did not exist in Plato's academy or in any other Greek academies from the fifth century BCE through the disestablishment of the academies by Emperor Justinian a millennium later. In Plato's time, craftsmen, artists, and architects learned their skill by working in a studio, just as navigators or soldiers learned their skill through sailing or warfare. The academies dealt with philosophy and the specific range of knowledge embodied in episteme. The artisans, artists, and architects of the time -- and all other practitioners of an art -- learned their arts and skills at work in the practical setting. This was the range or knowledge embodied in techne.
>
> Plato had little room in his Republic for poets, but he knew what poetry was. The making arts were so far off his conceptual map that he did deal with them in the academy, any more than he taught farming or agriculture. We all need to eat, but Plato treated growing food as something he assumed others would think about and manage. Philosophers, those who governed the academy, did something else and thought about something else.
>
> This is not a reasonable approach to education in our world, but Plato lived and worked 2,500 years ago and he saw things differently. I did not state my views: I stated Plato's views, and Plato would not have recognized an art academy as an academy like how own. One may imagine Plato's response to the modern university of the 1500s or the contemporary university today if he arrived in a time machine and had a chance to think things through. Nevertheless, that is science fiction, and it is quite different to saying what the original Plato would have thought of an academy teaching art, architecture, craft, or design.
>
> Yours,
>
> Ken
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Oct 14, 2011, at 12:47 AM, "Eduardo Corte Real <[log in to unmask]>" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> "Plato would have understood the university as academy. He would
>> not have considered the curriculum in art academies academic, even though
>> they used the word academic."
>>
>> You got to be joking
>>
>> Eduardo
|
