Nurturing Designers in PhD Research Establishing a Transdisciplinary Graduate School

As design as a profession and an academic discipline are maturing, there is a need to establish and improve the standards of design research. Especially in the area of PhD education, the growth in quantity and quality is a concern that universities are currently dealing with. In this paper we describe these developments, observations from our own faculty, where the number of PhD researchers in design has grown from about a dozen to a hundred in about twenty years. We finish by discussing the state and plans for structuring the PhD program.