Yesterday I initiated a research initiative on my quest to understand the world of the PhD. My goal for the initiative is to identify the gamut of research currently taking place in the design field. This is easier said than done. Design is as formal of a discipline as English or chemistry. Instead, it's a disparate discipline that find itself scattered into other programs. Part of my research involves creating a working definition of design, finding the programs that are offering PhD programs in it, and investigating the research that's happening. It's a literature review of sorts, more like a scavenger hunt for correlating programs.
My initial strategy is to find all the PhD programs that exist, evaluate their offerings for design research, and then dive deeply into the research currently taking place, as well as discover any research that has been published in the past. In terms of planning, I've allotted 2 weeks to decide on questions, embark on information gathering, and structure out the literature review. That's not a lot of time, however, the goal is not to get a perfectly prepared list, but instead to identify what places to look and define methods to prioritize my investigation. I am time boxing the event to keep it from becoming a nebulous question that never progresses. I established 20 initial questions to find answers to.
My goal is to define the best programs for researching design in context to social impact. There are other types degrees outside of the PhD, but my interest is in seeing the ways a PhD actually fits within the practice of design currently. I hope to investigate MA,MFA, and even MBA programs with similar intents, but my first pass will be on PhD programs.
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