Research Background
For years I had two indivisible professional roles—as coordinator of the graphic design research masters at RMIT University in Melbourne and as director at Studio Anybody a graphic design consultancy. My new position at Parsons School of Design is as Associate Dean. I am still a PhD student at RMIT and have found that without the studio and because of my PhD topic I have once again seamlessly incorporated designing into my new role, which is specifically designing graduate degrees.
Through my PhD topic I have come to see that my role as a practitioner-researcher is how I interweave my academic practice with my professional practice. As it is from the project-based research initiatives undertaken at the studio that I uncover new knowing about the way we practice and it is through publishing accounts of this practice-led research that I hopefully communicate this experience to the design community. I say ‘hopefully’ because I am unconvinced and sympathetic that anyone outside of the academy would care to read an academic paper about design practice.
I have also always been suspicious of the academy’s tendency to work with abstractions—since it seems too easy for these abstractions to become disconnected from the everyday reality of professional practice. So my practitioner-researcher approach seeks to acknowledge the situation-specific context of practice through valuing concrete observations in a way that aligns with the literacy of the audience. Since I used to do project-based design research in a professional studio environment I had felt confident that I almost achieved this ambition—my discontent is with the ‘formal’ research I used to have to undertake at RMIT which usually takes a written form (the US is far more flexible - or just doesn’t have processes in place). My PhD topic comes out of my belief that, for several reasons, this dissemination model fails to reach the community of critical practitioners I see as the audience who could value the research.