PhD Research Seminar

This course is a ‘full court’ seminar in which all doctoral students are invited and encouraged to participate and support your doctoral research.

The purpose of this doctoral seminar is to stimulate critical, constructive and generous discussion of PhD students’ research and writing in progress, to continue cultivating a lively and supportive intellectual design research community. Weekly readings will also be included to foster discussion.

Investigation and discussion by faculty and students of topics of interest from different perspectives such as building a design research discourse (reading research papers critically, selecting among publication venues); investigating alternative philosophical bases for design research (comparing empirical, pragmatic, and phenomenological approaches); or exploring methodological and theoretical conflicts in design research.

The core assignment is the completion of a paper or article for a peer-reviewed conference or journal. Alternately, the writing for the course could be a draft dissertation chapter or full doctoral research proposal, based on the guidance of your PhD advisor.

Learning Objectives

Encourage and expose PhD work to support the design research community of the Institute of Design and beyond

Learning Outcomes

Students will be able to progress on their own work and develop a rich set of critiques of each other’s work