Re-orienting Ph.D. education in industrial design: some issues arising from the experience of a Ph.D. programme revision

This article is intended as a reflection on the changing aims and intention of the Ph.D. programme in industrial design held at Politecnico di Milano. The Ph.D. programme started in 1990. A decade later, in 2000, the faculty faced the issue of partially maintaining the former curricula or radically changing the programme. Following the institutional changes derived from the restructuring of the national university system and stimulated by the critical and theoretical developments taking place within the international debate about the form and nature of the Ph.D. programmes in design, the faculty chose to encourage a radical reorientation in the intention and structure of the programme.

The article addresses the background context of the transition and the conceptual framework underpinning the activities of this Ph.D. programme.

Reflecting within a conceptual framework, an attempt is made to stress the relevance of the Ph.D. programmes in industrial design as strategic sites for research, where crucial efforts are concentrated to produce collective learning.

The article further proposes that Ph.D. programmes might best perform an incubator function, in terms of potential skills to capture key aspects of design research development and to manage the complexity of design issues deriving from the technology-society interaction.

This article does not intend to explore the results of the curriculum change (the revised programme being still in its pilot phase). Rather, it presents some elements of a progressive shift from searching in design to learning how to make research in design.