Cross-Cultural Survey of
Motivations for Pursuing a
PhD in Design
Greetings from our group of doctoral researchers in design at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology.
We are interested in establishing connections with other members of the international community of design researchers. Here in Chicago, we are now a group of thirteen. Our research interests vary, but fall primarily in the areas of 1) Design Policy, Management & Strategy, 2) Design Thinking / Design Methods, 3) New Human Factors, and 4) Communication, Cognition & Learning.
By surfing the Web and combing through the design-related listservs, we have identified a number of programs world-wide that offer a PhD in design. Click here to link to a list of the PhD programs in design that we know about. If you know of others that we have missed, please contact us.
We have competed our survey of researchers who are pursuing, have pursued, or are intending to pursue their PhD in some aspect of design. Thanks to all the doctoral researchers in design who participated in the study. We will present our findings at the conference on Doctoral Education in Design to be held at Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio, USA) from October 9-11, 1998. The results of our international survey of motivations for pursuing a PhD in design are also posted here.
If you have questions, comments, contacts, or completed surveys, send them to: Jay Melican.
Thanks for your interest and participation.
p.s. Read the paper!!!
or download it in rich text format (.rtf) at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/files/PHD-DESIGN/melican.rtf.
excerpts from our survey proposal
With this survey we seek to address the questions: What are the job prospects for a PhD in design? and What motivates interest (on a personal level) in doctoral education in design today?
The PhD degree in design clearly represents a milestone in design's development as a profession; as a factor in the dynamics of the design community's self-image, it remains in the eyes of most a curious anomaly. But the motivations of those individuals pursuing PhD degrees in design are not to be found in the professional discourse. Those motivations originate at the national, institutional and, most immediately, personal levels of concern. In some cases, and in some cultures, the layers of motivational factors built up behind an individual's eventual decision to pursue the PhD may be hard to distinguish from one another. Personal goals are wrapped up with the aspirations of design schools, and personal ambitions are encouraged (or not) by the institutions and national interests of the students' home countries.
With the proposed survey we expect to get at some of the motivations for pursuing a doctoral degree in design and glean insights regarding the varying levels to which degree candidates feel they are supported and encouraged in their endeavors -- either explicitly through national and/or organizational funding opportunities or more subtly by way of the expectations established for them by their countries' professional and academic structures.
In addition, we expect that our results may allow us to identify areas of inquiry that are particularly attractive to those seeking to conduct doctoral-level research in the field of design.
We propose to conduct an international survey of design researchers. We define as the population with which this study is concerned, those student researchers currently enrolled in PhD programs supported by a college or faculty of Design, Design Research, Art & Design, Industrial Design, or Visual Communication Design.
We do not intend to include in this population:
- programs sponsored by colleges whose primary focus is not design but within which it may be possible to pursue a project directly related to design (e.g., schools of management, schools of engineering)
- programs that focus exclusively on architectural design or urban planning
- programs that concentrate on art history
We will ask researchers to offer short answers to a small number of questions concerning their personal motivations for pursuing a PhD in design. The survey will be international in scope, and results should be representative of the culturally diverse community of researchers in design. We can guarantee a minimum of eleven respondents from at least seven countries (the number represented by the current crop of doctoral students at the Institute of Design at IIT), but we aim to include approximately 30 doctoral students from an international selection of the PhD programs currently in place.
Collected responses will be reviewed and summarized for presentation. A presentation of the material should highlight the most salient cross-cultural similarities and differences in responses, and it is likely to include anecdotal outtakes as well as tabular and graphical descriptions as appropriate to the qualitative data. The intent is to provide a basis for continued discussion on what might be done to encourage researchers of all nationalities to pursue doctoral degrees in design.
See a copy of the survey questionnaire.
Send questions or comments to: jaym@id.iit.edu
Updated: Sept 26, 1998
Copyright © 1998 Institute of Design, IIT