Organization of Education:

All aspects of the DSD program are organized around Graduate level electives in the Graduate School MSc 3&4 track, participation in Research Projects (see: Research Portfolio), and independent development of a candidates dissertation work. 
Candidates will be guided by DSD Faculty and Advanced Research and Teaching staff. External Faculty members from Leiden University, Department of Architecture History and Theory, will contribute  teaching as well.

Over the first year the dissertation work must exhibit progressive development and refinement. At the end of the first year, candidates will be required to submit a report documenting the results of the course work carried out. Candidates who successfully meet the standards of research capabilities as defined by the course work, and/or those who provide equivalent proof of these capabilities, will be asked to submit a definitive dissertation draft within the following six months.

Candidates will subsequently present the results of dissertation research to a research review committee in order to determine if the work is sufficient to continue with further development. This evaluation will be based on a go/no go policy (pass/fail). This process will conclude the first one-and a half year period of the DSD PhD program.

Approval for continuing with the PhD program will be given to candidates whose dissertation work has been evaluated by the review committee as both worthy of Doctoral staus research and feasible for completion in the two-and a half year period remaining.

Candidates continuing with dissertation work will be placed under a promotor / promovendus arrangement with Professor Arie Graafland. They will also be assigned one primary research supervisor (possible co-promotor), selected from the DSD Faculty and Advanced Research Staff members. In some cases candidates will also work with external supervisors; external supervisors must be approved by the candidates promotor.

During this two year term candidates will work primarily on completing their doctoral dissertations. Additionally, during this two year period candidates will be expected to engage in other research related activities; for instance: to submit papers for international conferences, contribute to publications in the DSD publication series or the DSD Footprint Journal, and depending on the candidates area of expertise and qualifications, they may be asked to contribute occasional lecturing in the DSD_Future Cities Masters Program.

Naturally, the final phase of the DSD PhD program will result in the Defense of the candidates Dissertation Manuscript.  The Dissertation Defense is a publicly held and highly ceremonial  event with procedural guidelines applicable to all PhD candidates at the TU Delft. 

Note: The DSD PhD program will meet with all  requirements as laid out by the  Executive Board of the Delft University of Technology. Candidates accepted to the DSD PhD program will be provided with all relevant official documentation.

Course Curriculum:

In addition to the necessary deepening of knowledge required to become an expert in the student's chosen field, the Ph.D. education provides broad-based training towards becoming an accomplished researcher. Core seminars will be offered which address methodological and technical problems, as well as  presentation and writing skills every PhD candidate must cope with.
Aspects of these seminars will include, but are not limited to the following:

Issues and Debates in art and architecture history  - literature research, summary of issues (developing a position paper)

Research methods and problem statement  -approaching the object of research (developing status quaestionis)

Presentation and argumentation - writing  abstracts, presentation of research, argument construction (conference paper submissions)

Scholarly Writing  - how to write a dissertation chapter (peer reviewed journal submissions)

These seminars will be taught in collaboration with - and taken jointly by PhD candidates from -  faculty members from The History and Theory of Architecture Chair, under Professor C. A. van Eck,  from  Leiden University.

Research & Design: a knowledge base for design, seminar with Arie Graafland. (Academic Year 2009 / 2010)

Overview:
The elective course Research & Design leads to the promotion of scholarly research and Ph.D. dissertations in the fields of architectural and urban design in the broadest sense.
The course promotes the goal of academically publishable research that is relevant to the immediate disciplines. However, art, architecture and urbanism form a decisive part of the received view of that which constitutes any cultural product and thus, the course also sets an aim for dissertations that provide insight for cross-disciplinary, yet theoretically aligned, audiences.
Research within the Research & Design track is focused on the reflexive accumulation of design knowledge. The concept of reflexive accumulation emphasizes how knowledge and information have acquired a central position in our current economy. Knowledge under these terms is not considered as merely an accrual, processing and control of facts and intelligence.  As a reflexive condition, knowledge invariably operates in the domain of hermeneutic inquiry. Further, a reflexive mediation indicates a relation to culture and design, as an aesthetic category in that product is understood as both material and symbol based.  These non-material products fulfill an increasingly important role within the building economy, within architecture in terms of operations as well as meaning. In the global economy, such products are related to services, communication or informational exchange.
Also see:

• Graafland, A. 2000. The Socius of Architecture. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.
• Graafland, A. 2002. Architecture-research-practice. In Delft Architecture Annual - 2000-2001. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.  

The Philosophy of Science  lectures with Patrick Healy  (Academic Year 2009 / 2010)

Overview:
Wilfrid Sellars in his Empiricism & The Philosophy of Science at one points turns to consider the role of model building and theory within empiricism and remarks "The truth of the matter, as I shall shortly be illustrating, is that science is continuous with common sense, and the ways in which the scientist seeks to explain empirical phenomena are refinements of the ways in which plain men, however crudely and schematically, have attempted to understand their environment and their fellow men since the dawn of intelligence."
In what Sellars describes as the ‘game of giving and asking for reasons' there is an indication of what can be said to be a candidate for knowledge, what is epistemic. The expression of epistemic facts involves the raising of the normative status of their expression. There cannot be in his view a general foundation for knowledge unless our beliefs are not only true but also justified. One claim or belief can justify another to which it is inferentially related. For Sellars without a familiarity with scientific thought one loses something essential to the appraisal of the framework categories of the common-sense picture of the world.
This course seeks to trace the origin of empiricism in the early modern period, especially in the work of Bacon and Descartes, and the relation between rationalism and experience. It outlines how the research for certainty which was required to answer skeptical argument, leads to the need to establish how knowledge is derived, whether from indubitable primary axioms, which involves deductive procedures, or, from the construction out of basic elements which are also beyond doubt.
This is followed by the contemporary discussion of Hume's problem of induction, especially in the work of Karl Popper. Hume's problem derived from his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, is based on his radical distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact; mathematics relying exclusively on relations of ideas and so concerned with necessary truth, and matters of fact relying on observation where there are no necessary logical truths, although we attach necessity to causal relations. Only a certain probability attaches to our impressions of the relation of cause and effect, and this is contingent. What then is the importance of immediate experience in such a view?
Popper's account and attempted solution to the problem inherited from Hume is argued in his Conjectures and Refutations, which is analyzed and presented in the second lecture on Induction. The issue of deduction and explanation is pursued through the work of Newton; and the contemporary work of Frege on the foundation of mathematics and Heidegger's criticism of and questioning of the axiomatic in his study of the problem of relation of beliefs and facts for ‘mathematical projection'. ‘Projection' here means the fundamental presuppositions and expectations science entertains with respect to the thing ness of things. This is also a study of how ‘modern science' is rooted in the will to axiomatic knowledge of unshakably certain propositions, and how it projects a universally valid ground-plan or blueprint for all things, as David Farrell Krell, in his introduction to Heidegger's ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics' from "What is a Thing?", puts it. Heidegger's resistance to the totalizing tendency of that ‘projection' in positivism, the most complete form of temporary empiricism, and the compulsive pursuit of technological mastery, is taken up in the concluding lecture of the course, and acts as a guiding thread throughout.
Another aim of the course is to examine and detail the reflective contributions of the various contemporary debates about science and society: the way in which ideology functions, the theory of research and its search for methods, in light of the social turn within the interpretation of knowledge. To this end the work of the third wave of American Pragmatism is examined, especially Putnam and Rorty. This is compared to the research and current debate around Thomas Kuhn and his theory of paradigms, and Michael Foucault and his study of the complex interweaving of discourse in their provision of a self-justifying grid for research. The entire course consists of ten lectures and the following texts are indispensable reading for the curriculum of study.

Themes:

• Philosophy of Science. Modern origins, from Bacon, Descartes, to Heisenberg
• The arguments on Induction, Hume and Popper
• Deduction, the creation of axioms, Newton, Frege, and Carnap
• Empiricism and Explanation, Sellars, Whitehead, Hempel
• Realism and Anti-realism in Putnam, Hawkins, and Psillos
• The structure of scientific revolution, Kuhn and Foucault
• 'Theory-laden Data' and Research, Laudan and Longino
• Philosophy and the question concerning Technology, Heidegger

Urban Question lecture series with DSD staff and invited guests. (Academic Year 2009 / 2010)

Overview:
Since the publication of David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity of 1990, many of the processes identified by Harvey and others have manifested themselves upon our contemporary human world: from the over-urbanization of the world's population, rapidly changing geopolitical configurations and shifting relations between State and civil society, the poignant environmental questions that plague us incessantly, to the encroachment of the media in our daily lives, the last decades of the 20th century appear to have functioned as a catalyst to capitalism in its advanced stages, rather than as a vehicle for emancipation, socio-economic improvement or general positive change. The transition from modernity into postmodernity has been everything but straightforward, or unproblematic. One thing has become clear: under the logic of flexible accumulation, endorsed by the slogan of modernization, progress, and globalization, capitalism has managed to mutate once again into what appears to be an all-encompassing economic system that, backed by parallel transformations in all realms of human endeavor, has transformed not only our imaginaries and desires, but also our lifestyles, subjectivities and practices.

The logic of neoliberalism claims to be based on values and ideals that cannot be sustained in reality: instead of balance, it produces deafening homogeneity and uniformity; instead of "difference" and variety, it thrusts informality. Troubled by a natural tendency to conflict and contradiction, neoliberalism and its many practices are (re-)producing extreme conditions of socio-economic polarization, environmental devastation, and more generally, differential conditions that generate degrees of unprecedented uneven development and asymmetries in all domains and scales. These changes necessarily manifest themselves upon the built environment, producing changed relationships within localities, cities and entire regions, posing new urban questions for the 21st century. What are the new urban conditions brought about by the liberalization of the global economy? Where has "the public" gone? Can we still speak of public spaces in the conventional sense under conditions of extreme commercialism and the dissolution of the political? What are the implications for the city? What is occurring in regions in which the transition into neoliberalism has occurred in partial occlusion, or invisibility? How are architects and urban designers reacting to these changes?
As entire cities rise from scratch in what was previously desert, and the peripheries of urban giants in the Third World consolidate into hyperslums, the role of architects and urbanist is called into question. Are we responding to the new urban problems and questions from a critical perspective, or are we perpetuating with our practice the "minor infractions" that will shape the contradictive cities of the 21st century?
In this weekly lecture series we will explore the new urban questions that surround -or spring from- contemporary debates on architecture, urbanism, and the spatial disciplines. We will also deal with issues that critically question the contemporary situation of the spatial disciplines as the locust of epistemologies of space, reversing the focus to an inquiry into disciplines beyond or outside the spatial ones in an attempt to relate these to the "minor infractions" committed by architects and urbanist in developing regions, such as Asia, Africa, the U.A.E., Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Note: Additional seminars and lecture series will be posted on the DSD website as they become scheduled.