The Impact of a PhD on Design: International Perspectives
Bloomsbury Visual Arts, London, England, 2024
200 pp. Trade, $90.00; paper, $26,95; PDF and e-pub, $24.25
ISBN: 978-3501-5104-8; ISBN: 978-3501-6000-2; ISBN: 978-3501-5106-2; ISBN: 978-3501-5105-5.
The Impact of a PhD on Design Practice consists of five interviews (or rather dialogues) with six PhD-holding designers. Laurene Vaughan, the author, has a long track-record of teaching design at RMIT university in Melbourne Australia. She supervises PhDs but is also an administrator. The book’s aim is not to discuss the contents of the various PhDs, nor to give practical advice about how to conduct and complete a PhD-project. Vaughan’s key question is: How has having done a PhD affected the designer’s development and career? Vaughan hopes that the interviews will encourage more designers to do a PhD themselves – whether specifically in design or in another discipline.
Several topics and observations recur throughout the book. The interviewees agree that, apart from helping them mature as persons, doing the PhD taught them skills they were able to put to good use in their professional careers. One of these skills is learning the importance of rigorous and evidence-based research methods; another, the ability to deal graciously with criticism and make that criticism productive; a third, the resilience to persist in the face of adversity and skepticism.
Vaughan concludes that the most important benefit that the PhD has brought the interviewees is “self-leadership.” Thinking about problems and problem-solving has strengthened their confidence and sense of autonomy. In turn, according to her, this has enhanced their ability to be a good leader and source of inspiration to others – whether in the context of supervising a design project, managing a team, or advising a client. Hmm … In my view, Vaughan’s claims about the PhD preparing for “leadership” are too general. Leadership requires qualities that are not necessarily learned in a PhD and, conversely, one obviously does not need a PhD to be, for instance, a good manager.
That said, I agree that the crucial concept here is “translatable skills”: the PhD has taught the designers to abstract from specific problems, which helps them to more quickly identify difficulties, opportunities, and constraints in completely different contexts … As Daria Loi states, “designers […] frequently confuse their design mastery with their creations. […] Design competency has nothing to do with outcomes. The real competency is the process” (75). Indeed, this competency, also known as “academic thinking,” is fundamental. Chris Marmo mentions in passing that, compared to a BA, even an MA is already an important step up in academic thinking (146). I was therefore somewhat surprised that at least one of the interviewees had embarked on a PhD project directly after her undergraduate degree, skipping the MA.
Another point mentioned several times is the opportunity a PhD-project offers to reflect on things. In the words of Loi, “academic thinking has something that industry thinking has not: the luxury of time” (87-88). This liberates PhDs from the inexorable demand to be continuously productive and provides the breathing space that not only aids personal growth but also helps generate creative ideas. And, as emphasized by Marmo and Stanton, joint owners of a consultancy, taking design decisions always has consequences for people, for the industry, and for the planet, and thereby inevitably has ethical dimensions. The luxury of time is, thus, the fertilizer of translational skills as well as of responsible deliberations about the value of one’s design.
PhDs typically prepare one for a career as a university researcher and lecturer, particularly in the humanities. Several interviewees are clearly passionate about teaching, underlining that they not only enjoy interacting with young people but also learning from them. That the humanities’ PhD degree is an asset beyond preparing one for good teaching tends to be underappreciated, as Vaughan points out: future employers apparently do rarely see the surplus value of the degree. The interviewees prove they are wrong – but it is undoubtedly significant that by the time they embarked on their PhD, most of them already had working experience in the world outside academia. In all likelihood, this background gave them a better idea of problems in the “real” world that the PhD might help solve.
Let me dwell a bit more on this tension between art and practice in PhD research – specifically in the so-called “artistic PhD” variety, in which artistic output is a core element of the degree. My own involvement with it is limited to examining one such PhD a few years ago. While this was a rewarding experience, I struggled with the question what precisely is, or should be, the status of the artistic PhD (see also Forceville 2021). In my view, it is very difficult to show mastery of (a) theories (= the “academic” part); (b) the specific artistic practice the candidate is an expert in (= the “applied” part); and (c) how to bridge the two (= the rationale of the artistic PhD). Particularly the last issue is a thorny one. Of course, practitioners can be inspired by an excellent theory, but in an academic context that is not enough: they need to demonstrate they have understood it. On the assumption that the practitioner (designer, artist, choreographer …) is a good craftsperson, the question is then: how can it be shown that the combination of theory and practice leads to something that is more than the sum of its parts? Surely, we are not surprised that influential art theorists, such as Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Arnheim, and Arthur Danto, are not also famous artists, nor that the likes of Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso are not known for having come up with art theories that would survive the strict scrutiny of academic scholarship (although their thoughts can of course inspire research)
I suspect the problem partly resides in the label “PhD” itself. The title has for so long been associated with theoretical research that extending it to practice remains slightly awkward. To be sure, I am fully convinced by the interviews in Vaughan’s book that the time and energy invested in a PhD is well-spent, paying off in a variety of ways. Indeed, I would wish every practitioner with curiosity, resilience, and ambition the chance to work on a project for years without the pressure of commercial interests. But if we want to go on calling this a PhD, the similarities and differences with a “regular” university PhD need to be more clearly formulated.
The designers also raise issues that are of interest for purely academic research. I was intrigued by the story of, again, Daria Loi, who submitted her PhD in the form of a suitcase (!). She fought for permission to do this as she felt that language alone could not do justice to what it was she wanted to communicate. I recognize this conundrum. Investigating visual and multimodal communication, I often wrestle with the paradox that capturing my findings only in words is as necessary as it is unsatisfactory.
The suitcase case brings to the fore another knotty matter. (PhD) researchers worth their salt show a good understanding of one or more theories and subsequently often “apply” these to new data. Now in humanities research focusing on complex cultural topics new applications rarely work in a completely smooth manner – simply because the architects of the original theories by definition could not have anticipated how novel, previously unexamined data might problematize or even challenge their theories. This sometimes results in an uncomfortable friction between theories and data – while it is precisely this friction that may make the new application exciting and potentially insightful! If this turns out to be the case, the original theories need to be adapted, expanded, refined, or tweaked … But if these theories are well-established, proposals for revision will seldom be warmly welcomed by scholars who have made considerable investments (in time, energy, reputation) to master them. And if the “data” are artistic practices, any adjustments suggested are probably even more controversial.
Yet another aspect of the theory-practice tension is the following. Let me first pledge my unconditional support for fundamental research. It is simply impossible to predict whether and, if so, when and how fundamental research will help solve future problems. That said, I find it worrisome that many aspiring humanities researchers (and their supervisors!) do not even consider the question in what way any conclusions they may be able to draw at the end of the PhD might – however modestly – benefit broader societal interests. Of course, the current PhD system, at least in my part of the world, does not help in this respect. The usual procedure is to try and secure a PhD position immediately after completion of a (research) MA. It is risky to try and work outside of academia after finishing the MA, learn about problems in the real world, and then, possibly, return to academia to embark on a PhD. After all, once one has been out of academia for a couple of years, it is very difficult to get in again. Reading the interviews strengthened my conviction that facilitating this latter trajectory will result in more interesting PhD dissertations of the purely academic variety, too. And thanks to such cross-fertilization, it may become more common for such humanities PhDs-holders to subsequently return to the world outside academia to help solve yet more problems.
Here is a final thought. The interviewees mention that they often had to explain and defend their ideas to audiences from very different backgrounds and disciplines. Whereas they usually knew what they wanted to convey, they constantly had to think, and adapt, how they were going to do so. If having a PhD means that one has learned not just to think about problem-solving at an abstract level but also to communicate about this to a wider audience, that in itself would fully justify the degree.
Reference Forceville, Charles (2021). Book review of Danny Butt, Artistic Research in the Future Academy (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2017). Visual Communication Journal 20(2): 310-313.