February 28, 2025 | 5 minute read
Headed back to school...
I'm going to be getting a PhD at UC Irvine in Informatics.
This has been on my "life goal" list for a long time, and I've had a few false starts. About 15 years ago, I applied to Carnegie Mellon to teach, and simultaneously, I applied to their PhD program. I was rejected to the PhD program, but given a job offer for a fulltime, non-tenured faculty role (which I turned down.) I understand that academic institutions exist for both knowledge production and knowledge dissemination, but one would think that the relationship between tenure (and therefore institutional respect), a PhD, and teaching would be flexible. Surprise, it isn't! So, fast forward to today, and I'm excited to be joining a graduate program where somewhat ironically, I'm teaching and employed as the Associate Director of Design, Leadership, and Practice, MHCID. My advisors will be Katie Salen and Paul Dourish.
Goals
I have two goals for this upcoming experience. One is to move beyond the "you don't have a PhD" part of the conversation when I want to work in higher education in a meaningful and productive way. This isn't a wonderfully mature reason, but it's a real one, and the lack of the degree is holding back the influence I can have on helping designers learn and grow.
The other goal is to spend a material amount of time exploring a particular aspect of design, looking at how others have considered it, and finding relationships between what I know and what I learn. This is going to be a pursuit of intellectual curiosity, without the constraints of clients, stakeholders, or any other industry rigidity (is this naively prescient?)
About this mini-site
As I've started this process, it's been difficult for me to find information about what to expect, perhaps because I'm in my late 40s and not following a traditional path towards a doctorate degree. So, I'm going to catalog my "non-traditional" experiences, and hopefully, this will help someone else who finds themselves checking off their intellectual-bucket list items in mid adulthood.
I'm also going to catalog the actual work itself—the coursework, and knowledge production.
Statement of Research Intent
I'll start here with my statement of research intent, which was part of my application package.
To the application committee:
I am applying for a PhD in Informatics; thank you for the opportunity to share my professional experiences, as well as my motivation for applying to this program.
My 25 year professional career has been split between working as a professional designer, and teaching design.
As a practicing designer, much of my work has been in the education space. I held the role of Creative Director at frog design, a global innovation firm. In that role, I was responsible for establishing the education practice, where I taught clients how to bring a design process inhouse. I ran workshops with executives at AT&T, HP, and other Fortune 500 companies, where I taught them how to make things in the context of strategic problem solving. These experiences opened my eyes to how intimidating a creative process can be, as I observed C-suite decision makers become embarrassed or shy about making artifacts to represent their ideas. I recall an executive at Disney outright refuse to draw, saying “I don’t do things like that.”
During my time at frog, I published Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis with Oxford University Press.View Exposing the Magic of Design on Amazon In this book, I explored the creative process that occurs while synthesizing qualitative research data to make meaning out of it, and highlighted that meaning-making is not exclusive, and the magic of discovering insight can be democratized through process.
I also founded Modernist Studio, where I have taught practitioners in the context of their businesses.Read about how I sold Modernist Studio in my book Cashing Out Notable experiences include 3-month apprenticeship-style training for 50+ leads at Booz Allen Hamilton; 4-month training for 100+ designers at USAA; multi-day training workshops at Bank of America; curriculum definition at the United States Office of Personnel Management; the design of the curriculum for Bloomberg Philanthropy’s Mayors Challenge; and Partner training at Deloitte Digital. Throughout these programs, I began to understand how the corporate culture and “DNA” of an organization can influence the creative confidence of the employees.
As we formalized our consulting practice at Modernist, I worked to integrate participatory design approaches into our generative research programs. During these activities, where we provided toolkits and structured sessions for our customers’ customers to explore new ideas, I regularly observed people display the same self-deprecation and struggles related to making things and visualizing ideas that I observed in our clients themselves. People consistently demonstrated a hesitancy to share ideas in a tangible form rather than a spoken form.
During my time at Modernist, I published Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love with Harvard Business Publishing.View Well-Designed on Amazon In this book, I described the way creativity plays a role in innovation, and how to establish product/market fit through a user-centered design process.
In addition to my professional work, I also taught at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) for four years. During that time, I created the Interaction Design program, where I developed a rich user-centered curriculum. I also led the overhaul of the Industrial Design curriculum, and integrated the same focus on generative and evaluative user-centered research.
During my experience at SCAD, I taught a mix of 430 undergraduate and graduate students in over 51 classes; my course evaluations, averaged across all of these students, were approximately 1.2 (1 is best, 5 is worst), with a standard deviation of approximately .5. While at SCAD, I published Thoughts on Interaction Design with Morgan Kaufmann, where I explored the relationship between interaction design and topics like persuasion, communication, experience, and authenticity.Read Thoughts on Interaction Design online, for free
I also founded Austin Center for Design (AC4D), a school in Austin that teaches interaction design and social entrepreneurship to people looking to change careers. My students at AC4D were all adult learners, the majority of which were going back to school for the first time in many years. I observed anxiety and worry from these adult learners when they began to give form to their ideas—that somehow, if they made an artifact that was objectively lacking in craftsmanship, they too were lacking as human beings.
Throughout these experiences, a constant theme has been teaching people how to be designers, how they can be comfortable with a creative process, and what leads people to succeed or fail in creative engagements. I have asked, and tried to answer, the questions:
- Why are people reluctant to make things?
- Why are people reluctant to share the things they make?
- What are ways to help people build confidence, and skill, so they can experience the power and value in creation?
I am interested in continuing to explore these topics, with a particular focus on how creativity empowers "regular people" to engage with the world differently, and how, and why, people embrace or reject their abilities to make things as a way of exploring, learning, and gaining confidence.
If I am accepted to study at the Informatics program at UC Irvine, I will research, create and share knowledge about the circumstances that foster the magic and self-growth that comes from making new things—from seeing oneself as a creative person, and gaining the abilities to bring new ideas to life.