A Phd in Design

I recently ordered, through the arcane customer distribution department of John Wiley & Sons, a copy of Gabriela Goldschmidt’s “Linkography – Unfolding the Design Process“. This is the latest volume in MIT’s “Design Thinking, Design Theory” series. Aside from the thinking and the theory, her representation of the design process results in some quite beautiful abstractions that sparked…

Studying for a PhD in design, as I am, has inevitably led to quite a lot of reading around the subject of design. This was particularly necessary since I arrived at the subject partly  from a practitioner’s perspective. I knew I had a bit of catching up to do with the frameworks and approaches that inform the discipline.

It’s creeping towards the summer and this is festival time. I’ve only been to one music festival of note and that was Latitude in 2010. I failed to pick up a programme in advance and so spent some time during the weekend without sufficient data to decide which of the many stages to go to. I find…

Notwithstanding my successful resurrection from memory of the GREP function in my text editor (see Datafest-2013 for details) and the glorious time savings this produces considering the number of links generated (yes I think it was 1432) it was nevertheless time to have a word with myself. This fiddling with data around the margins of the study must…

Academics are interested in the dissemination of research outcomes – it’s one of the measures that is used to assess their (institutional) income. And social scientists (probably all academics but I’ve been hanging out with the Geographers) are increasingly interested in creating visual artefacts as a method of dissemination. They’re also interested in the analysis of visual artefacts…

In his recent review of the HS2 project Sir David Higgins advocated the removal of the proposed North London Rail link between HS2 and HS1 on the grounds that it would provide a relatively poor return (removing the need for a one stop tube journey) on an apparently unreasonably large proportion (£700m) of the total budget (£42.6bn) . (Therefore HS2 –…

I had the pleasure last month to present a paper at the Design Research Society Conference in Umea in Sweden. Full papers were double blind reviewed prior to acceptance and so I had high hopes that the event would be of excellent quality and that I would be able to do mine justice. With beer at £8 a…

Here I attempt to make sense of a methodological quandary that occurs where studies of the design process meet studies of debates as a design process. I started this train of thought in response to feedback from DRS2014. Debate and design The direct study of the design process attempts, among other things, to contribute to…

The connection between art and the academy and the conundrum of how to make research more creative continues to flit around my desk like an insistent butterfly. It looks like it would be very pretty if only it would sit still for long enough. Fine artists seem to have a lot of latitude in their practice.…

The design process can be described in many ways. And the way that a designer gets from A to B can be traced along many routes. This we can read about with John Chris Jones or Kees Dorst and we can imagine what goes on under the bonnet with Nigel Cross or Bryan Lawson. If we want to think about…

The Stop HS2 campaign website recently revisited an interview with the Secretary of State for Transport where she drew on a Victorian heritage of ‘boldness’  to justify the need for a new High Speed Railway. I was considering this in general terms as a kind of design precedent in my last post but the StopHS2 campaign were also…

It was time, last week, to crank up a long standing appointment I had with Bruno Latour. As my head was turning towards academic research activity, only and already two years ago now, I kept bumping into him.    As part of my initial scoping of railway history I found Greet De Block’s (2011) work on the…

ANT is a kaleidoscope (Mol, 2010, p.261).  If we pick it up and look at something, lets say for the sake of argument a High Speed Two railway project, how does that work?

As I continue to plug together the pieces of my thesis, I am searching sometimes for the right approach to what is sometimes called analysis and for a voice of sorts that will sit comfortably both on my desk and within this discipline of design. I also continue to notice an ill wind blowing through…

Kees Dorst’s new book, “Frame Innovation” arrived today [1a]. His first case study refers to how the proposed route Dutch high speed rail project took 15 years to get off the starting blocks due to the limited frames utilised by the politicians involved. So the book seems like a good prospect from this point alone. Also though, and more…

The machinations and refinery of academia can sometimes be overwhelming. This can provoke a paralysis of analysis, but perhaps in a slightly earlier phase than the term’s application to, for example, public policy debate. A strategy, the success of which remains to be seen, is to attempt to engage in other activities alongside that of the PhD life and to use them…

Some time ago, at the height of what might come to be known as my “Prezi-mania”, I was working on how to turn my continuing use of Prezi as a presentation tool into something that might help me to explore and represent the data that was underpinning the development of my thesis. This led to…

The design process has been described, modelled and designed quite a bit since one of the landmarks in the history of design studies, the 1962 conference at Imperial College on design methods. Jones, J.C. & Thorney, D.G. (editors) (1963) Conference of design methods. Papers presented at the Conference on Systematic and Intuitive Methods in Engineering, Industrial…

The UK parliamentary process looks like this: But this representation is complicated by the fact that the system is bicameral: a piece of proposed legislation can be brought into either house first and must pass through both. The main stages that take place in both houses are: First reading Second Reading Committee Report Stage and Third…

As a distraction from finishing a PhD it’s may or may not be a good thing to be offered money to entice you away from the screen and make you do something else for a while. This inevitably leads back to the screen which in my case this year would lead me to work on a parallel blog for…

The final stages of a PhD can, it seems, get a bit messy with the various administrative function, the need for examiners to sign off on corrections and the need for your host institution to tick boxes, dot “i”s and cross “t”s. This institutional process is perhaps exacerbated when the internal machinations of higher education, along…