First industrial Ph.D. at AHO

Industrial Ph.D. is a three-year research program. The candidates take an ordinary Ph.D. while employed by Norwegian companies. The research will focus on issues and topics that have clear relevance to the companies which they working in.

Industry-oriented research
The purpose of the industrial Ph.D. scheme is to strengthen the interaction between companies and research institutions, to contribute to more research in businesess and to train researchers with knowledge relevant to the company they are employed in. The research must be long-term, business-oriented and have the same scientific level of quality as traditional doctoral education.

The Research Council of Norway established the Industrial Ph.D. scheme in 2008, after the model of the Danish Industrial Ph.D. scheme that has existed since 1972.

Visualization Expertise
Schlegel will combine doctoral studies at AHO with her work as creative director in DiizGroup. She holds a Dipl. Ing. Architecture from University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg (Germany), where she specialized in the fields of visualization, illustration and digital tools. In 2009, Schlegel was appointed Creative Director of the Oslo-based DiizGroup.

She wants to investigate the growing use of visualization experts among architects and the relationship between these two groups of expertise.

- This is a topic that interested me even as I wrote my master’s thesis. I found that this theme opens many doors that I want to investigate further, says Schlegel.

She believes that this research theme has clear relevance to businesses.

- Architects are increasingly depending upon visualization expertise outside their own field. This division of labor brings with it challenges as it adds a step in the work process, she says.

You can read more about the scheme here.