The academization of design and its consequences for the visual, textual and artefactual production of practice-based research

Postgraduate design research, and particularly its practice-based forms, is currently in a process of academic legitimisation. This legitimisation has consequences for faculty and student identities particularly where the propositions for scholarship in design may marginalise the distinctive mix of artifactual, textual and visual vocabularies that characterize practice-based design research. For design, I suggest how the social practice to academic literacies in emergent disciplines can help make transparent the strategies and forms in dissertation text construction, supervision and writing. This paper exemplifies the practical relevance of these strategies through reference to student case studies.