PhD in design: a reflection from a PhD student and his supervisor

Abstract

IntroducationDesign-related doctorate education in Chinese universities and colleges is a recent phenomenon. The topics, like the nature of Design PhD and the procedure to achieve it, are under-discussed [2,3] . This paper reports a PhD student's personal experience and reflection in order to bring some external materials into the discussion of PhD Programs in design sections in Chinese context. This paper begins with the theoretical discussion of PhD study in general and in design programs, then a specific PhD case in industrial design will be introduced. Theoretical Discussion in Doctorate ResearchResearch, in general, means investigation and inquiry into people and/or things [4,5] . There are various types of research, ranging from "repeated searching" (original emphasis in Krippendorff's term [6] ) for some information, i.e. merely intelligence gathering, at one extreme to NobelPrize awarded projects at the other [7] . Phillips and Pugh [8] did not agree purely information collection (i.e. "what" questions in their term) as research. They argued that research should go beyond description and require analysis, explanation and interpretations; in other words, research should deal with the "why" questions and, to some extent, generalization. Lawson [9] echoed that research should contribute to the understanding of involving "a process of interpretation and extension beyond the mere acquisition of facts or knowledge" (p. 111).Frayling [5] distinguished the research with a small r and big R which is adopted by this paper to resolve the epistemological conflicts with what is research. Research could either be informal and loose-defined inquiry, i.e.research with a small r, or systematic and rigorous inquiry often with a well-defined plan in advance, i.e. research with a big R. In academic field, research scholars mostly deal with the latter type of research, which is undertaken to produce reliable and communicable knowledge. Purposive, inquisitive, informed, systematic, methodically rigorous, critical and reflective, and communicable are some keywords identified to characterize of academic research [1,10] . In general, a piece of academic research should consist of four elements: (1) an identified problem or question to research, (2) an understanding of the wider context in which the research question addresses, (3) a set of appropriate research methodology, and (4) original contribution, often shared in the form of a peer-reviewed document [11] . Research-based PhDA research-based PhD is an academic award that recognizes the degree holder has successfully completed an independent program of scholarly research in a particular approved topic which results in an original contribution to knowledge. Besides the basic goal of producing new knowledge, the PhD research has a narrower and more specific purpose to produce the "trained researchers" or "licensed" independent researchers 1 [8, 12-15] . 1 Considering research training as the basic nature of PhD already implies the position taken in this paper is in favor of US...