DDR4 20th March 2004: QUESTION 6(Transcribed from audio by AR, Panel Chair) )End of COFFEE BREAK Professor Richard Buchanan, Host. So I hope, and I don’t know whether we can follow through with that, but I hope in this next session we might begin to do some of the knitting together, and drive our discussions a little more forward; and not just issues of the past, but where design is worth going. And the Questions might lead to that. I do respect that john chris’s point of view that integration occurs in our mind. But we do need an environment and conversation where the bits that surface are rich enough; that we can take them home and put them together. Integrate them. So let’s begin again, and let’s see where it goes. AR Dr Arlene Oak,(Audience Questioner 6) When doing design study design research, students who have an undergraduate background in practice, often when they get to the dissertation situation of their doctoral study in design, have to, or are encouraged to, or may decide to, adopt methods and approaches from some of the social sciences – anthropology, social anthropology methods, students may do so in a way that is not always in a structured or theorised way in relation the those academic disciplines. This leads to a situation when a student writes a dissertation and draws on these disciplines but does not necessarily do so in a clearly formulated way, as they are supervised by someonewho may not necessarily be familiar with the discipline; and may be examined by someone who is also not necessarily familiar with the discipline too. This leads to a situation that perpetuates itself in terms of the wider understanding of design research to other academic disciplines. As I think design research has so much to offer to social science and humanities. I don’t think this is necessarily always recognised, because the research that is done is not well structured within those disciplines. QUESTION 6: Other, associated questions are: c. How can we ensure that doctoral students are adequately supervised and examined in a way that is effective a rigorous as well, when they are working in an interdisciplinary framework? AR (Panel Chair) MP All I can draw upon is our experience at Sheffield Hallam University. A number of our doctorate students are based in Art & Design. They are over interfacing with other disciplines, or engaging in quite a lot of depth with other disciplines, which include medical physics, HCI engineering, discourse analysis and criminology. Actually it is very important part of our philosophy that design research has to engage with n other disciplines because design research has something very distinctive contribution to make to the other disciplines. So how do we ensure that do integrate with those disciplines in a rigorous way. The methods that we use, and I see these methods used elsewhere. First of all, ensure you have a good doctoral programme to underpin all your doctorial work and research student work, which has a rigorous and clear, comprehensive research methods component to it. Secondly, effective supervision. In most cases our students have a Director of Studies based in design. In other cases you have a supervisor that’s in criminology or HCI, or wherever, and they would have group tutorials supervisory meeting, at least every couple of months. And the student would also be encouraged with individual tutorials as well. That can only happen when you have links with other Faculties, so its this active process of tryig to bridge into these Faculties, and not be insular all the time. And a further thing that is important to do, is to enhance networking opportunities for students. In fact, just over the coffee break I was talking to a student here, who has just completed, and doing some research in HCI that has some parallels with some students that we have at Sheffield Hallam University We don’t have enough networking opportunities for research students, and it is something we have to work at more over the next few years. DD And there is good evidence happening at various places. Then you have examples like at Sheffield Hallam, as Mike has just mentioned, where they is a rigorous kind of training, and so on. I think this notion that people will come out of poor doctorial programmes and then supervise poorly is a real problem for us at the moment. Of course design is at the cross roads of a number of other disciplines. And it just seems natural to me that we would engage with other professionals in other places. One of the students that I inherited at Staffordshire was dealing with isostatic dust pressing in the ceramics industry, which was not something I know much about. So we just went off and found other people from other faculties within the University, but also looked to another university; to a department of material science, that could supervise at that kind of level. So I think there is a problem, particularly with smaller Institutions of having enough people with high level skills across this disparate range of disciplines that we are dealing with, and there is something much better that we could do, as Institutions to collaborate around supervision and indeed examination. You asked the question how can design students become more knowledgeable of the methods and approaches in the humanities? Well you give them a good grounding of comparative methodology in their first year. And I really don’t see that is a problem if there is a rigorous training programme of that kind. And can they be adequately supervised? Well I think we have to extend supervision and collaborate in as many ways as we can. HF This also then widens out the possibility of finding first supervisors, second supervisors in particular specialisms and also in the same way, the research methods course we were talking about earlier. It does have to get broader we are finding, and after two years after being one generic stand has already divided into two to try and cover broader issues. jcj Coming to your very interesting question, I would say ‘specialists can’t integrate and yet there are many students on integrated courses, which includes design, I would say, and quite a number of others - architecture. I used to run a course called Design Technology, not Design Science, in the 60s and one of the most notable ex-students is Nigel Cross, sitting over there. He will agree with me and Robin Roy, if he is here, and others, that they became lecturers on this course, and supervisors also of researchers, very soon after graduating. Now that might seem an introverted thing to do and originally we used the whole of Manchester University to draw upon with all sorts of specialists coming in the first one or two years of this Masters Course, and Diploma Course as well. But the students used to complain to me – ‘we cant understand these specialists, they give us loads of things to do, and huge amounts books to read, but we can see they can’t integrate and they are asking us to integrate their knowledge, but they are not experienced in integrating, and they are expecting us to do it without teaching us how to integrate’. So that made me think ‘OK I’ll appoint ex-students’. So that is what I did then. It was not difficult to do because the person I was responsible to agreed with me, that is Prof Harper, who originated the course, and I think it worked very well . We even had courses in the holidays for the teachers in how to teach integratively, in the Easter Vacations we did one or two of these. One was on the design of conferences, I remember. And it was practice in how to get your feet wet, both students and teachers, in what we called ‘problem finding’ And we made it a sort of two weeks process at the beginning of each student’s project, where they had not chosen their topic yet , and everyone was collectively problem finding in the field, out of which several students would produce a thesis or something. And that was a technique which I could go into more detail of if anyone is interested later. One or two slight points, which you also raised from Canada - Arlene Oak. (You sound as if you come from one of those English Wessex countryside novels.) (audience chuckle) Supervisors need to be capable of both integrating and analysis. And if they don’t know how to do it yet, then special courses must be provided. If they are going to be given promotion in the department, and if they are going to get through bar lines in salary, then they should only be allowed to if they can both integrate and analyse. I would say that should be a rule of thumb. I personally have no PhD because when I tried to submit the stuff which was in Design Methods (book) I was told it was not academic knowledge; it was not new knowledge. And when I tried to join the Society of Industrial Artists, as an industrial designer, I was refused again. So I was rejected by both the professionals and the academics but somehow now, very late in life, I have managed to get a degree given to me free! (Audience chuckle) I also went to Cambridge University, where you can get the Masters degree for paying five pounds. Still true - it is only five pounds - for being older that’s all. So there we are. (Audience chuckle) AR (Panel Chair) DO To create a culture where insight and synthesis is rich, rather than where analysis is rich, I think is a complicated thing to do. this whole integrative process – and I totally agree with john chris that it is the individual that integrates the knowledge. And to do that they have to be willing to reflect, and be willing to have a tendency for insightful observation, or the organisation around them has to encourage insight. And so with the MA students at Goldsmiths I have sat on the back of John Woods wonderful model of appraisal, which I will encourage him to talk about, I hope he can say something about that. He has a wonderful process of systematically analysing the work, and giving scores from nought to five, to plus five and to minus 5 along certain dimensions. We have worked very hard together on the dimensions, but no matter how many dimensions you get, unless they are speaking to somebody on something that it is meaningful to them in all their work it wont’ get the respect that it needs. The work that John Wood does encourages people - they write to a reader, and they define who that reader is, so the reader might be the designer of a software tool – somebody that they admire, and I think if you are writing your knowledge and expressing your knowledge to someone that you admire, even if it is a fictitious person – Umomoso, or whatever chris’ Greek tragedy play is , somebody who aspires to the perfection that you want to achieve, then you put that personality around that person and you write for that person, it brings life to your thesis. AR (Panel Chair) N.Teymur, Architect (Audience) Now I agree with David that a sort of 'illiterate' (This is not a derogatory word – just those people that don’t read and write, they just design), there are some students who just design, they don’t read. So it is important to give them some research and theoretical training. That is one issue. The other issue is that, generally speaking, most PhD’s are method based. They pick up a method from another discipline and apply it to a problem. Whereas I suggest the best way of doing it is for the supervisor to challenge the student to define a problem - a new problem. The supervisor must be on top of area and absorb all these areas, so they can actually see what problem is relevant and therefore direct students to reading necessary, or required literature to solve that problem… rather than the other way round. And the other method I use is; that I challenge the students. For example, if someone is reading a Heidegger or the fashionable French or German continental thing, I say ‘could you apply what ever you have read already to an everyday problem, like the Iraq war, for example? Can you say something about it? If you can’t say anything about it, why have you read it? So if you are to come to design research, or applying it to something else, you must apply it to the world at large. So this is the method I use. I challenge students to actually clarify their thoughts and apply it to practical problem. John Wood. Goldsmiths College. University of London. In a western context, it is a Socratic idea. It is the first base. You have to know yourself deeply, creatively before can then empathise with your reader, or your client. Turn yourself round. Understand what it is like in their shoes. That is a form of writing I would argue. So don’t approve of rigour, because that’s dead. By definition it is what dead bodies become. So in other words, design is highly relational – in other words, what is helpful to write is a set of relations, and again we’ve inherited a very rhetorical frame of writing from the academies. We don’t need to have that. You can choose not to use that, and to use it whenever you wish. At times you may be rigorous when you what to be fair across the board, but actually you cant. It is never fair. It does not matter if it is fair. What matters is if people are becoming more engaged with their habitat; whether they are damaging because of their lack knowledge, or having too much knowledge, or being able to write too well. So as Denis suggested, the minimum set of relations you can hope for in any piece of writing would be where you have a four fold structure, where you have the ‘I’; you have the context - in other words you have the world; you have the object of your passion – design, drawing, whatever it is - theory; and then you have a reader. And there are many configurations here, but that’s the minimum grammar of four, which then if you look at the relations between those four parts, which gives you. six. I could go on for ever and ever on this. Peter Town, Design Consultant (audience) Let me just tell you a story from my career from the real world. I started a creative consultancy in the 70-‘s, after graduating from the College. And at that time, I had access to, not only access, but was invited and had a place in Corporate boardrooms. I am talking about major companies here, and I was able to advise and help with their strategy for a range of things. And to give you an example of one of the projects that springs to mind, we were working for one of Sweden’s second or third largest Corporation. They had a number of subsidiaries, manufacturers, distributors throughout Europe, and they were looking to expand and it didn’t know what to do. As a designer, i.e. as a creative person, my opinion was sought. I thought about the problem, and I created a boardroom table sized jigsaw of all their products territories, subsidiaries and distribution methods, and laid it on table, presented it It was very successful. The company rolled out a business plan. I was happy with result of that. I was just able to translate what they wanted to do into a visual and physical way, and it was a bit of fun – I said "This is Germany – they producing framing here, where do you want it to be distributed? And everyone was involved, and it worked really well. So what happened next. We moved into the 80’s and to be honest we were elbowed out of the Boardroom by management consultants – by McKinsey and Baines, people like that. Then five or ten years later we were pushed further down the food chain by Accountants. They were the next in flavour in the Boardroom. And now recently, as my clients used to be multinationals, by a new sort of communicator, which I could explain who they are. ( - the academic. Professors were in and Accountants out.) But let’s say the creative business has moved further and moved further down food chain. Until today I had not really thought about this much, or why this has happened. And it has just occurred to me that during the 80s some of the bigger practices within London – the swishier outfits - started to employ what I call loosely - 'academics' - people with a lot of initials after their names. And it was not really the service the Corporates were looking for. And I think that is where we lost credibility. Because the best creative people can be, if when they start writing stuff, and doing that kind of work, is poor management consultants. If you are a large corporation and you have loads of money, you just buy the best in each area. So I would like to put that to everyone now, that as Professor Buchanan said we have a last opportunity, I wonder whether that window is still open, and whether we are not too far down the food chain already. I hope that is reasonably coherent. AR (Panel Chair) Naomi Gornick , Dundee University, Scotland I’ve been involved in the world of design and management. The management field has certainly taken to design with a relish. They have taken it under their wing, and they have said: ‘My gosh, we’ve listened to Tom Peters – and Tom Peters says, “Wow, design is marvellous – look at the way designers work….they are so good at this. They have a got this marvellous take on conceptualising products ; they have a marvellous take on modelling products; they’ve got these marvellous processes, let’s adopt this for creative people in our companies. We can take an example from design and use it in the management world.” As a consequence management schools are now adopting design teaching, design methods and design thinking in their own courses; to the extent that I think they are subsuming the profession. This is what I am extremely concerned about. We have design and management on the design side, and very established it is in this country; but at the same time Management Schools are now undertaking design management programmes, which are if you like, taking away the product from the design world and developing it in the management world. They are making recipes about design but don’t know how to cook. AR, Panel Chair.
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