From practice to practice-led research: Challenges and rewards

This chapter reflects upon the author’s experience transitioning from industry-based practitioner to academic researcher in the field of communication design. The communities that support this transition are considered, as are the ways in which academic design research can offer value back to all the members of those communities — graduate candidates, higher degrees research supervisors, and academy, industry and undergraduate design educators. In 2004 the author commenced a Masters by research at RMIT University in Australia after fourteen years away from study at a university level. Four years later he completed his Masters, and later that year received a scholarship to undertake doctoral research in communication design, again with a practice-led methodology. The author’s research project, its methodology, and its findings are not the focus of this discussion, instead, this chapter examines the transition from practice into research, and the conditions that support that transition.