蕃邦第174週

What is different about Art & Design PhDs? John Z Langrish, 2007

A key difference between Art and Design and the rest ought to be a concern with things
visual. There could be a fascinating conference on visual questions, visual methods and
visual evidence but it has not happened.
If a PhD involves a thesis/argument then visual evidence is something that could be used
to communicate and even convince other people. In effect, if someone does not believe
you, and ‘well look at that’ does convince them, then what you have shown them is visual
evidence.
Some of the questions that could be the basis for Art PhDs are questions of the form what
do artists do, how do they do it, why and with what result?
To some people, this is the start of a discussion about practice based PhDs but as already
claimed, the only practice that really matters in a PhD is the practice of research. This is
not the same as saying that professional practice cannot be the SUBJECT of research;
this is quite different from awarding a degree FOR practice.
Now, of course, professional practice can be the subject of PhD type research in many
academic areas. A management PhD can involve studying the practice of management
and finding out something about how it is actually done, how some managers are ‘better’
than others, how managers are affected by changes in legislation, new technology etc etc.
A PhD in law could involve finding out about the practice of law and so on. This is a
perfectly good model for Art and Design PhDs. People have obtained PhDs for finding out
about what practitioners actually do. In graphic design, for example, there have been
PhDs on the use of drawing by graphic designers and on how designers select a particular
form of visual material for inclusion in a poster, package or pamphlet.
The above examples all involve finding out about other peoples practice. There is a
special form of PhD that involves finding out more about professional practice by involving
the researchers own practice in the research. There is nothing unusual about this and
such PhDs are not singled out as being ‘practice based’; they are sometimes called action
research, which roughly means doing something and finding out what happens. So a
production manager might alter the method of production in the factory under carefully
controlled conditions and observe the results. A social worker or a teacher could carry out
a carefully designed study of their own way of working together with finding out the results
of changing things.
Thus a member of staff involved with teacher training obtained a PhD from a careful study
of the effects of changing the basis of training from being college based to being school
based.
Given that it is clearly possible for a practitioner in other areas to gain a PhD for a study of
practice (gathering evidence to answer a question that provides new knowledge about
practice), why are some people still making a fuss about practice based PhDs?


Full Text: http://web.mac.com/intuitive/DART/past_events_files/Langrish%20J%20What%20is%20a%20PhD%2007.pdf