A View From the Outside: Challenges of the Design PhD Christena Nippert-Eng, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Sociology Department of Social Sciences Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, IL USA nippert@iit.edu This paper was originally presented at the Cumulus Doctoral Supervision Workshop at the Instituto de Artes Visuais, Design e Marketing – Escola Superior de Design Lisbon, Portugal, May 23-25, 2005. It appears in a slightly different version as: Nippert-Eng, Christena. 2005. “A View From the Outside: Challenges of the Design PhD.” Idade da Imagem. Revista de Arte, Ciencia, e Cultura do IADE, Instituto de Artes Visuais, Design e Marketing, No. 3, S. II, 114-124. Copyright © 2005 by Christena Nippert-Eng. All rights reserved. This text may be quoted and reprinted freely with proper acknowledgment.
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Background The supervision of doctoral students takes place in a number of ways and tends to shift in form as students move through a program. Initially, the review, acceptance, monitoring, and training of a student take a more dispersed, institutional form, with many faculty sharing the supervisory role. “Supervision” not only happens between the student and her or his course instructors, but it also takes the form of codified expectations, deliverables, and benchmarks that are used to assess student’s overall progress. Later, the supervision of a student tends to become more focused and the responsibility of a much smaller number of faculty, perhaps a single person who is formally recognized as the student’s supervisor or advisor. This is the individual who bears the largest responsibility for the advanced student’s training and completion of the program. Supervision becomes manifested in a series of conversations, feedback on written work, and communiqués on the student’s behalf. Yet even this relationship (or cluster of relationships) is embedded within a broader institutional environment. The department and the university continue to play a key role in shaping and supporting the student and her or his research. Outside funders also may continue to look for ways to encourage doctoral candidates and prospective publishers and employers will provide valuable insights to them. Because the supervision of doctoral students is distributed in these many ways, I think of it as a multifaceted phenomenon and find it is useful to consider it across all these manifestations. Accordingly, here I have decided to think broadly about the most significant, frequently occurring problems I have witnessed among doctoral Design students. And while I focus on problems that are experienced at the level of the individual student, I often do so from the perspective of the faculty and the program at large – wherever the supervisory role is or should be manifested. My Method I have served in the role of an outside dissertation committee member for a dozen doctoral students in design. These students have been members of a number of different programs but are mostly located in the United States; all but one of them involved a classical, dissertation-based effort. Most of the significant challenges they’ve faced probably are common to the dissertation process across disciplines in the U. S., but some may be unique to the design dissertation because of the particular permutation of scholarly, disciplinary, and personal histories that come together here. A sample size of 12 is hardly a significant one. One should never generalize based on these few cases. Yet, as designers and sociologists know, case studies can be very informative, especially if one is interested in knowing more about a process or experience. Individual cases can be very good to think with, particularly if one is interested in the details of a story.
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I began this paper by thinking of each of the design Ph.D. candidates with whom I’ve worked and considering whether any of them faced serious difficulties while pursuing their degrees. After listing any serious problems each student had, I grouped all of the resultant, experiential hurdles into categories. Then, I looked at how many individuals were significantly affected by each type of challenge. I present these clusters of problems here, in order of increasing frequency. That is, the farther down the list we get, the greater is the number of students who experienced this as a significant challenge to finishing their degrees. Some of them did not finish, incidentally, but most of them did, in spite of – or perhaps because of – these challenges. This is not to say that earlier items in the list do not require just as much structural attention from program leadership as later ones. Any of these problems can be a permanent roadblock to completing the dissertation. Therefore, each one of them needs to be taken seriously and considered as important design criteria to be met in the planning and execution of the program. Rather, what I think the order of the list may imply is that less structural attention has been given to the items appearing at the end than to the items occurring at the beginning of the list. This lack of systematic planning for what then become the most common problems may be rooted in something that I do think is unique to the situation of doctoral programs in design right now. This is the fact that so few of the faculty creating the programs and functioning as advisors and committee members have built their careers on strong research and scholarship, with or without a Ph.D. after their names. Problem #1: Programmatic Requirements that Exceed a Student’s Capabilities While its implications are devastating for the potential completion of the dissertation, this, the least frequently occurring problem I’ve witnessed, is the result of what I would call a programmatic mistake in student retention, possibly also in admissions. The education process pushes through an awful lot of people who simply do not display the intellectual capacity to pursue an advanced research degree. These individuals are different from the case of students who are perfectly capable of achieving such a degree but who fail to do so because of finances, poor training, poor supervision, illness and other unfortunate events, including falling in love. Here, I am talking about what tend to be two kinds of students, although it is by no means true that an individual must be of one kind or the other. It is possible that a single person can embody both characteristics. That is not the case in my experience, however.
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The first kind of student suffers from an intellectual rigidity -- a stubbornness, if you will -- that results in the student refusing to embrace the discipline and the need to study and understand what the faculty have deemed to be important and essential in it. This kind of student tends to want to study one thing and one thing only, from her or his own hodge-podge of conceptual and analytical perspectives, and using an undisciplined mish-mash of techniques. In more sociological terms, the student refuses to become properly socialized as a member of the profession. The second kind of student may very well want to do whatever the faculty ask of her or him, but cannot. She or he may be unable to adequately comprehend or communicate sophisticated ideas. Or she or he may not be able to work independently as a researcher with a self-defined agenda and appropriate tool kit of the discipline. It does no one any favors, least of all the program, if such students are allowed to continue on in a program that is clearly inappropriate for them, not even if they were to be given a Ph.D. in exchange for simply contributing lots of tuition money over great periods of time in the department. This would constantly set up the individual for failure and convince anyone who knows them that your doctoral program – your training and your seal of approval -- is not to be taken seriously. These students are precisely why doctoral programs need to have serious moments in the post-admission, post-initial coursework process for objectively reflecting on the match between the student and the program. During recruitment, people can look remarkably different on paper and via earned credentials than they turn out to be in person. And afterwards, students like this may do just fine with professors who only expect them to take, memorize, and regurgitate perfect notes that reflect the professors’ points of view, only. This hardly qualifies an individual for pursuing a Ph.D. In fact, the amount of faith one should put into the admissions process -- and even students’ early coursework as indicators of suitability for the Ph.D. -- depends on just how much responsibility an institution wants to take with regard to training students. If the institution does not want to provide the training necessary for students to engage in advanced, independent research, then the focus must be on recruiting – bringing in individuals who already demonstrate the requisite skills and outlook before they even start the program. But if an institution intends to take a much stronger hand in providing this training to its students, then there must be additional moments built into the post-admissions process in which one evaluates a student’s potential for providing a substantial, original contribution to the discipline and its body of scholarship. Some of the ways both students and faculty can achieve these more accurate, ongoing assessments include comprehensive exams based on material that goes far beyond coursework (whether written or oral), publication requirements, and even portfolio-type reviews of the comprehensive body of work produced by the student, to date. Everyone should understand that after these bench marks, students may be advised to rethink the wisdom of pursuing a doctoral degree at this institution, at this time in their lives.
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The key is to do this on as objective a basis as possible. You want to rule out the uncomfortable position that faculty are sometimes put in when they lack a fair, solid method of evaluating student potential for independent research. In such cases, guilt and sympathy (rather than a real belief in the temporary nature of a student’s underperformance) allow students to continue in programs that they probably never should have been allowed to enter, but in which they certainly should not be allowed to continue. Of course, such programmatic exit points are a benefit to handling more than the undergifted or inflexible kinds of student. They also provide moments at which students who are experiencing other kinds of troubles or mismatches may realize that this is not the time or the place for them to be thinking about a dissertation, either. An important footnote here is that I am not talking about students who may have some unconventional learning differences, called “learning disabilities” in much of the literature. Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell – these unbelievably creative, explosive thinkers were all dyslexic, for instance. I think often these days of how to design an education process that would nurture a Da Vinci, or an Einstein. Not all, but many students with learning differences are highly gifted with extraordinary abilities to model systems and create new, uniquely original solutions, insights, and artifacts. It is for this reason that I think these students should be actively recruited into the design world, by the way, not merely accommodated by it. Moreover, by the time they get to the doctoral level, such students will undoubtedly have in hand most if not all of the coping mechanisms that they may need to make it through such a program. Some adaptations may be necessary to keep them going but these are nothing like the intellectual limitations I have described above; just slight tailorings that might be needed in the communication process. Problem #2: Troubles with the Material World There are an assortment of financial difficulties that have constrained both the length of time it took individuals to complete the doctoral degree in design and whether or not the dissertations were actually finished at all. Typically, when students are accepted into the program with limited or no funding, there are three things that they do. The first is to run up a lot of personal debt. Living off of credit cards and bank loans will get you through, but at great cost. The second, usually reserved for more advanced students, is to teach – either to undergraduates in their own university or elsewhere, or, oddly enough, within their own graduate program. The third response is to take on contract work – usually a series of well-defined jobs -- within the design industry.
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There is a reason that adequate institutional financial support for students is a good idea. It is so that their need to pay the rent and the immediate gratification of the classroom or working with someone else on outside projects doesn’t supplant the longer-term and often not so gratifying process of getting the dissertation done. Wage labor makes degrees take a lot longer to obtain. It makes it likely that they never will be obtained, too, because the student may suddenly decide that their side-track (teaching, contract work, even living in perpetual poverty but with the advantage of no accountability for a lack of progress) is a much preferable path to what used to be her or his main track – the dissertation. Incidentally, the lack of proper institutional support for doctoral design students in the United States has another potential impact on the design PhD experience: the internationalization of domestic doctoral design programs. Because other governments fund their students to go get advanced degrees in design elsewhere, programs in the United States may find the number of native-born students significantly smaller than the number of guest students. It is an oddity, for sure. Yet even fully-funded international students may face another group of significant material concerns, especially in the form of family constraints. While a student may be well supported by her or his home government while studying in the States, a spouse may not be permitted to work at all. This forces the decision of whether to risk separation for the duration of the degree or trying to weather the effects of poverty and forced idleness for one person while the other tries to completely immerse her or himself in the exact opposite. Moreover, as a logical response to this and to the issue of work permits, graduate students of any nationality may well decide to have a baby during the dissertation process. The impact of a child on finishing a dissertation depends on many things, not the least of which are students’ parenting role expectations and their financial and childcare resources. Mostly, it probably depends on how creatively the roles of student and parent can be managed, and how vested a student is in either of those roles. Whether a new baby becomes an excuse for leaving a program or an excuse for finishing quickly and efficiently, one thing is for certain – the child becomes an additional source of concern for the student and her or his family, competing for the attention and other resources one needs to spend on the dissertation. The employment opportunities that a student believes are waiting upon her or his completion also affect the duration and conclusion of the dissertation – as well as the student’s worldview while writing it. Personally, I find the lack of jobs that demand and reward the acquisition of the design PhD in the United States remarkable. Even entry-level, university positions that demand a Ph.D. in nearly every other field do not seem to preference a hard-won Ph.D. in design. (The fine and performing arts provide some exceptions.) In industry, whether in basic R & D or in applied jobs, the Ph.D. seems equally unnecessary and unimpressive. Certainly, possessing a Ph.D. does not get you any higher of a salary than anyone else – not like bringing an impressive list of previous clients might.
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In fact, students tell me that they actually seem to be disqualified from jobs that should be ideal for them, because a) the people interviewing them can’t envision why anyone would need such a degree, b) their supervisors would not have such advanced credentials and this would make working relationships unnecessarily awkward, and c) no one else they would work with has a Ph.D., either, and this wouldn’t be good for the team – or Human Resources. The only students I know who have not encountered this odd stigmatization are those who have returned to their native countries and took up prestigious university and global corporate managerial positions. It doesn’t take a designer’s imagination to figure out how discouraging such a situation is to some students. Why finish your Ph.D. quickly – for some, why finish at all – when there’s nothing truly rewarding waiting for you at the end? This is clearly a discipline-wide problem that needs a discipline-wide, multi-institutional solution. I am aware of one more situation in which the material world winds up causing serious problems for the timely completion of a Ph.D. This is almost certainly unique to design and is possibly a growing trend. Moreover, this situation uniquely combines 1) the problem students face when current employment obligations compete with their studies and 2) the reverse of the previous problem I mentioned, i.e., a situation where an employer actually wants the student to get a Ph.D., perhaps as a condition of continued employment. In the case I’m thinking of, the employers are design Department Chairs and their universities and the employees are already faculty in these departments. The challenges this poses to the doctoral student are significant and difficult to surmount. At the very least, I imagine that all the usual problems of a fully employed, wage-working doctoral student are present here, but the emotional toll on the student is even more extreme due to the heightened visibility of the candidate. Problem #3: A Weak Culture of Research and Fragile Work Practices There are two students I’ve worked with very closely, and who I consider to be highly desirable yet quite different kinds of doctoral candidates. The first is really the ideal student, relying on self and a strong committee in spite of very poor supervision to produce a superb thesis. She is highly motivated, fully financed, her husband was employed throughout her doctoral experience, and she had a baby just as she was finishing up. She is now an assistant professor. This person loves research, working alone, working with others, teaching, reading and writing. She loved being a student but only as a stepping stone. She wanted to finish quickly and effectively and step right into employment with a job that might not be ideal but was, nonetheless, a job. This student is very good at developing a multi-year plan and really following through with it, making her an excellent prospect for tenure and in any kind of a programmatic development role. What does this kind of student need from me? Lots and lots of ideas – great conversations and everything I can think of to create opportunities for more. Yet she needs hardly anything at all from me when it comes to setting goals and actually doing the work needed to get done.
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The second student is possibly a better thinker than the first, a real scholar, but like myself, possibly too comfortable being a student and in debt, and possessing no real belief in a reason to finish other than to stop banging her head against the wall. She is a gifted researcher and in many ways an utterly ideal collaborator. She also likes the challenge of teaching and does it very well. This woman thinks on her feet in the ways that few people ever manage. But she does not like working alone and prefers the immediate rewards of whatever’s at hand to the rewards that may or may not come years later if she laid the careful groundwork now. At her core, she is extremely well suited for the high-paying, prestigious, corporate research position she now happily occupies. What does this kind of student need from me? Well, some ideas, of course, but even these are important mostly because social exchanges are really important to her. In fact, like so many students, she needs lots more support than the first student just in doing the work, in keeping her on track, and in actually following through on the vision and talents that she has. Partly this is because this student needs more social support – the interactions around the ideas are as important to her as the ideas, themselves -- and partly it is because this student needs more help in learning how to structure the way one tackles a problem and the sequence of effort that is necessary to explore and resolve it. This student also needs more help in figuring out precisely how to work each day – how to execute the problem strategy. This is not a style of work that comes easily to her, nor does she see it as innately desirable, no matter how necessary. And it is this student that I think we need to design for when it comes to helping all doctoral students develop and follow good work practice. If we do that, then the first student – along with all the others – will have a much better go at it as well. The doctoral dissertation experience traditionally includes a lifestyle of working alone -- reading and writing, doing original research, having a place to do it, and becoming comfortable being there alone. Even in the natural sciences where graduate students may work alongside many others doing experiments in labs, the coursework leading up to this and the writing process leading out of it frequently are largely isolating experiences. The reason there are so many ABDs out there (students who have complete All But the Dissertation) is at least partly because working alone is so hard. Without the structure of courses and meaningful, exciting interaction with others on a daily basis, few people can last through the dissertation writing experience. It is an ordeal in the religious sense, where a certain truth is revealed about you in the most grueling way. Some people argue this is as it should be. Academic life is one where you can expect to feel alone most of the time, where no one else in your department is going to show any interest in your work, and where you will have to be able to do it alone or not at all. Therefore, it is fitting socialization for the dissertation experience to be as it is.
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Yet in the best places, there is also a culture of research that helps offset this. The environment, itself, leads to the kinds of supportive, formal and informal interaction that keep students – and faculty -- pressing ahead. These support structures may be especially important for graduate students in design, who may well have been practicing professionals for many years and used to working in highly interactive teams. Honeycombs of individual offices opening into busy public spaces, spontaneous door and hallway conversations, reading groups, in-house seminars by department members, weekly meetings for ABDs, workshops on writing and grant proposals, guest lectures by researchers presenting cutting-edge findings, conferences, shop-like research groups with multiple students working side-by-side on an umbrella problem, teaching in areas central to one’s research so that even undergraduates help force further engagement with the dissertation -- these are all ways in which graduate students’ progress is fostered and in which good working habits can be nurtured. There is no substitution for an immersive institutional research environment and the way it can encourage desirable behaviors and understandings in everyone, including students, while suppressing the rest. But even this is not enough. It is up to faculty to teach and nurture best work practices in more microlevel, one-to-one interactions as well. This is the point where one should have an arsenal of “how-to” books, articles, and personal anecdotes to draw from, by the way, and where sympathy followed by no-nonsense strategies and specific goals come in very handy. For instance, the single most common problem that students have quietly, shamefully, revealed to me is one they are surprised to learn that I share. This is the difficulty of getting up each day and writing by yourself and for yourself about material that is difficult and impossible to separate from your self-image, future success and the wellbeing of everyone you love. This is quite a different task from returning email, texting, blogging, and everything else that can gratify a real writer’s need but still not get your research written up. I regularly start by challenging the student to reflect closely on their day and their habits. Where did they write the best? At what time of day? What sequence of activities did they need to fit around it? What were their consistent activities of procrastination? Once we have that information and a plan for when and where to write, I suggest getting a timer and setting it for 15 minutes. For the next day, all I want them to do is write for 15 minutes. If they want to go longer, they may go up to half an hour, no more. By the end of the week, they should try to sustain their effort for up to an hour and a half. Things like this help students develop the research writing habit, and keep it focused on that. At one point, for instance, I challenged another doctoral student to agree that we both would get up each morning for the next week and put in one hour of writing on our research before the rest of our households awoke. We would each email the other by 7AM to signal that we’d completed our task, and see how that felt by the end of the week. For a different student, we agreed to swap written work at the end of each week for a month. We didn’t agree to read it, either.
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This is the kind of thing that it takes sometimes to help a student along – not to mention his outside faculty member. Is the student increasingly absent from the office? Send an email once a week to ask how things are going. Better, send an email once a week asking about a reference or some other scholarly point. Is the student lonely? Meet for coffee each week to discuss progress and goals and set up a study group of similarly unanchored students to do the same. Is the student reluctant to speak up or meet people? Attach them to your side at each conference you attend and introduce them to everyone. Things like these are small gestures perhaps but they can have a huge impact on everyone, particularly when it’s the student’s advisor who takes responsibility for them – and not a more peripheral person like me. Problem #4: (Perhaps Devastatingly) Poor Supervision At this point, I want to discuss what most people think of when they think of doctoral “supervisors” and “supervision”: the moment in the process when a student begins to rely heavily on a single individual to get them through the process, especially the dissertation. Like “poor students,” “poor supervisors” are not necessarily bad people. They simply may be individuals who are not -- for whatever reasons -- suited at that time in their lives to the thirst-quenching but exacting role and (often impoverishing) life of a genuine student or the thirst- quenching but exacting role and (often impoverishing) life of a genuine mentor. (This is particularly likely if they are not "living the culture" each day, surrounded by colleagues where everyone seems thoroughly convinced that these states of being are desirable.) And just like students who may be performing badly because no one ever taught them certain necessary skills and outlooks, some individuals may be poor supervisors because they've simply never been taught how to be good at it, or given the opportunity to do so. Institutions are obligated to take care of these possibilities first. Training, benchmarks, and backbones are necessary to deal with either side of this equation. Of course, without the requisite expert knowledge it's awfully hard to set up proper programs and benchmarks or to know when to stiffen our spines or slouch a little. But what I want to do is separate out the supervisor’s potential as a supervisor from her or his actual performance as one and focus on the latter. My position is that any faculty member will be a better or worse supervisor at different times in her or his life. Moreover, some faculty will work well with certain kinds of students and they will work less well with others. But all faculty can become better supervisors of all kinds of students if they are given proper, on-going training in this. Equally if not more important, they should be subjected to a reward structure that makes clear the desirability of their good performance as a supervisor and convinces the faculty member that it is in her or his best interest.
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In the cases with which I am familiar and where a supervisor’s performance has been decidedly poor, the situation has involved a design faculty member who has demonstrated mastery of a substantive area but has not been through the dissertation experience himself. In some cases, the individual has not even demonstrated mastery of nor personal interest in the doing of research. In addition, in all these cases, the advisor was, at this time in his life, remarkably self-absorbed. This may have been for good reasons. But it nonetheless manifested in little time and attention for others, much less the kind of generosity of attention that can make or break a graduate student’s career. Interpersonal cheerleading has little to do with whether or not a faculty member is providing good supervision. Sometimes these poor supervisors were genuinely delighted for their advisees when they managed to finish on their own, as well as genuinely concerned for those who were struggling – on their own. Sometimes it’s a different story altogether, as with advisors who believed that whatever happened with the student’s life and progress on the dissertation had nothing to do with them as a supervisor. It was seen instead as a hallmark of the student’s character. Whether emotionally supportive or not, these supervisors were completely out of touch with the students, with their progress toward completion of the project, and certainly with the quality of the work that was being produced – or that could be produced, given how the problem and the project were structured. It was a happy surprise if the advisor was suddenly presented with a great dissertation. It was just as much of a surprise to learn from someone else that the student had left the program, for good. Certainly, one first step toward successful supervision of a dissertation is for the supervisor to have been through the process her- or himself. Being a doctoral student is a lot like being a parent – no matter how much advice other people give you and no matter how much you master the related assemblage of language, facts, and best practices, you can’t begin to really imagine what this is like until you’ve done it yourself. Hiring design Ph.D.s who had good experiences with their supervisors and home departments is likely to help improve the supervision of students right away. Along with that, departments can use external people from other departments and disciplines to help oversee the dissertation process. If you are really relying on them, though, I suggest you pay them. Don’t leave this at the level of a favor. This is not what the normal “outside” dissertation member is expected to do and the amount of attention and effort it requires should not be treated the same way.
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The new, co-supervising “hybrid” models in design that may help in this regard. One supervisor might be picked for substantive expertise and the other may be selected for process expertise (this would be a faculty member who has a Ph.D. but is not an expert in the area the student wants to pursue.) This is a good idea, but it is probably not necessary unless the program is following the natural science model in which a doctoral student has only a single sustained relationship with faculty -- her or his advisor -- once she or he is ABD. In other models, students decide on an entire committee at the time of proposing their unique dissertation research agendas and sustain relationships with all committee members throughout the process. In these, either of the “co-supervisor’s” functions is already covered by other members of the committee. Programs also can give students and faculty as much time as possible before linking students with advisors and/or increase the ease of switching to another advisor if the match proves unfruitful for either party. This should be particularly easy if the student is self-funded. Of course, faculty may decide that their preferred choice of solutions to this problem is for everyone else on the committee – and maybe some of their friends in other institutions -- to swoop in at the last moment when disaster is no longer deniable and frantically figure out how they can save the student and the work. Someone usually volunteers to take the lead on this, with others parsing out whatever tasks they can among them. Everyone carefully avoids placing any blame on the offending supervisor, of course, and, after handing out tissues and crisis counseling to the student, takes up the exhausting task of trying to figure out what they’ve got to work with and what they might reasonably get instead. Depending on what the goals of the program are, this, too, is a logical solution to the problem of poor supervision. It doesn’t fix the problem, but, like most kluges, it lets you live with it and still get on with your life without really having to change anything. And you can still honestly claim that you are in the business of producing Ph.D.s. For those of us who take our pedagogy seriously, though, this is a most unwanted, unnecessary, and onerous alternative – probably because it is usually serious teachers who have to fly in from the wings and rescue the situation. And receive very little credit for it. If the issue of poor supervision is to be taken most seriously, there should be department-wide, mandatory training for PhD supervisors; department-wide, mandatory and evaluations of PhD supervisors; and periodic, department-wide collective reflections (mini-retreats) on the process of supervision, preferably with an outside facilitator.
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The kinds of issues that could be raised and subjected to careful thought in this way are really unlimited, reaching past the nuts and bolts kinds of issues that might first come to mind. For instance, at this point, I have heard a number of stories from students about supervisors who apparently find it difficult and undesirable to work with students who are not “like” them. I am aware of several cases in which women doctoral design students (and their male and female friends) have been convinced that specific male advisors are incapable of working with women, to the point of being not only neglectful but abusive. I am also aware of several cases in which students have been convinced that some advisors are only capable of working with students who are from the same country of origin, with similar interactions if they work with “others.” The point is that if there were institutionalized occasions – including anonymous surveys -- in which something like this could be addressed, supervisors and the program as a whole would be stronger for it. A useful conversation on what amounts to the joys and sorrows of supervisor-student diversity, for instance, could focus on the emergence of normally hidden assumptions, and how, once uncovered, those assumptions become opportunities for everyone to learn more about each other, the process -- and what the possibilities really are for global design, after all. Ultimately, though, if there is an expectation that supervisors will nurture others by sharing their talents and insights with them, then programs need to have objective metrics and data-gathering moments in which supervisors are evaluated as strongly as students are, in meaningful ways. Then -- whether it is a "poor supervisor" or a "poor student" at hand -- everyone has to be willing to act on the results. The underperforming member of the community must be given extra, very concrete help to get better, with a clear understanding of a mutually agreed upon course of action and of the consequences if this should fail to happen. If the additional training does not work the individual should be allowed to experience the consequences of her/his (lack of) action. Problem #5: Poor Scholarship Scholarship has many manifestations. One aspect of it is problem definition. A doctoral researcher needs to have ownership of the problem she or he has decided to tackle. Students should have a great deal of control over the turf they carve out for themselves, a deep interest in their problem, and comfort with it changing over time. A well-defined problem is appropriate in scope, both breadth and depth, and is part of a bigger research agenda in which future projects could continue to build off of and add on to it. The goal of good, well-defined problems is to allow biography to meet the discipline and transform both in the process. Two students had serious problems in this regard. The situation for the first student was compensated for by two factors. An unusually generous faculty member agreed to work closely with the student and try to provide him with an appropriate problem that welded their interests together, then closely monitor his work for compliance. Concomitantly, a very grateful committee breathed a sigh of relief and agreed to approve whatever the advisor wound up doing with this student. That student completed his degree.
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The second student was talked into tackling a problem in which he had little personal interest. At one level, the problem was interesting but to do it right would mean an enormous undertaking. At another level, the problem lost all interest, in part because it became something a first semester master’s student could do and wouldn’t significantly contribute to anything. But this student needed money and if he studied this problem under this new advisor, he could be funded. Then the advisor, who was not a researcher, rarely spoke with him. When he did, he made demands but gave little advice. What advice he gave conflicted constantly. Despite an enormous potential and a great deal of time and effort already invested in the program, the student left as soon as an alternative career path emerged. Yet most of the students I’ve worked with who were challenged in their scholarship did not have this kind of problem. The most common and pervasive problem I’ve seen in design doctorates appears in the form of dissertations in which authors appear 1) badly read, and 2) unskilled in the basics of logical argumentation, referencing, and clear writing. Students from social science and philosophy backgrounds exhibited none of this; only those with backgrounds in design and art. Designers tend not to be wordsmiths, like so many of the rest of us. In fact, as a group, they not only spend relatively little time writing, they are not especially avid readers, either. Indeed, the designers I know mostly communicate verbally, visually, or by letting a tangible object that they or someone else has created make and provoke their arguments for them. This is a decided disadvantage in the doctoral studies game. It is an easily remedied one, however, which means that once it is addressed, the additional strengths of the designer – ones that very few other academics have – will really tip the scales in design’s favor. Just as someone can enlighten me about the rules of good visual communication, drawing my attention to things I’ve never thought about but see all the time, so can design students be enlightened about the rules of good scholarship. It takes a teacher, however, to help give meaning to what we see, so that we can begin to master the ability to produce it ourselves. Being poorly read – or creating the impression of it -- is, of course, easily fixed. Designers’ bemoaned lack of a canon is no excuse for the startling absence of references to other work that jump out from page after page in some students’ work. If you don’t have your own body of work, you draw from everyone else’s, using whatever works to move you along. Magpie scholarship can be a strength as easily as it can be a weakness. The key determinants are how focused the agenda or problem is and how well a student can weave together the best works that are recommended by the best faculty – many of whom will come from other disciplines -- and some serious time in the library.
Christena Nippert-Eng. Challenges of the Design PhD. Page 15.
If the student is, in fact, well read, and simply hasn’t been instructed in norms of referencing, that’s an even easier problem to solve, assuming there are some good scholars and librarians available to teach this. The professional culture of the designer may be at odds with this, though, again. Designers seem to work so seamlessly in teams, and focus so much on the deliverable that must be produced at the end of the process, keeping track of who said what and crediting individuals with key ideas seems to be missing from their daily lives. Similarly, the culture of design may mean students lack a basic orientation that is needed for proper scholarly argumentation. This is a process of carefully developing ideas and evidence, presenting them in clear, concise writing, where the language one uses matter a great deal. If design practice tends to cares more about outcomes than what goes into them, it is important to point out how a dissertation, a scholarly bit of writing, is about the entire thing process. If anything, these priorities are reversed. There is an additional, structural problem that contributes to sloppy scholarship. The relative lack of design research publishing venues means not only that a research core will be slow to develop, but also that students are denied key tools of socialization and outlets for their work. Peer-reviewed journals are critical in fostering a culture of research – something to aspire to, to contribute to, and to debate with. But students still may be asked to produce smaller, shorter papers that are “publishable,” if not actually published. This can be a huge help in fostering better scholarship. Papers like these give faculty opportunities to see students’ best efforts, working with them through a series of drafts, and give everybody some necessary practice before the dissertation. Of course, this also requires a few things: the faculty who read these papers must be conscientious readers, generous editors, and good scholars who understand referencing and argumentation. Conclusion If these problems are not unique to the design doctorate, the uniqueness of design certainly puts a unique spin on them. Perhaps it offers a unique mindset that can produce solutions, too. Moreover, the difficulty of addressing each of these problems remains to be seen, and will inevitably vary according to the cleverness, motivation, and resources of each department. The only reason to reflect on problems is to turn them into opportunities for improvement, however. If the goal of doctoral programs in design is to attract the best possible students and have the highest possible proportion of them complete their best possible thesis in the most appropriate amount of time, then this is the kind of reflection we should welcome. Actually, I am extremely optimistic about the future of design doctorates, in part because the faculty generally seem so welcoming of this kind of self-examination. We have good prototypes to learn from now, if not several iterations beyond that, and a very clear sense of what needs to be done. If we know the challenges, we’re well on the way to meeting them. And no one is better suited than designers to hammer away at something, point by point, so it keeps getting better and better.