Dr. Halina Dunin-Woyseth is an architect and professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). Since 2010 she has also been a part-time locally based guest professor in Gothenburg, Sweden, holding the concurrent guest professorships at the Institute of Conservation, University of Gothenburg, and at the School of Architecture, Chalmers University of Technology.
She was responsible for establishing the Doctoral Programme at the AHO in 1990 and has been at its helm since its official launch in 1992.
Her professional, education and research interests were originally in urban design and planning, but in the recent two decades her special focus has moved to the issues of knowledge in design-related professions like architecture, industrial design, design education, urban design and planning, as well as landscape architecture. Since 1991 she has been an editor and co-editor of the AHO-based scientific journal Research Magazine, which has documented the development of these knowledge fields, especially with regard to research education for professionals recruited from various design areas. In this context the concept of “making disciplines” was established and has been built upon in several Nordic milieus of design research.
Dr. Halina Dunin-Woyseth has extensive experience in teaching, research and research education in Scandinavia and in other European countries. She has often served as a doctoral supervisor. Since 1993 she has been every year an external examiner or a member of examining committees for doctoral dissertations across Scandinavia. She has also been involved in various research assessment projects in Scandinavia as well as in an EU-context.
Since 2006 she has been engaged in developing an experimental ”research by design”-based doctoral programme for architects, designers and artists at the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture (Brussels and Ghent) in Belgium, where she served as a guest professor in Design Theory in the years 2007 – 2009. She is currently involved in the research project “Design scholarship – ‘the doctoral way’. Some micro-studies of the recent past and the near future”.
Design Scholarship – the ‘doctorate way’
Areas of expertise: Knowledge aspects in research and research education in creative fields (architecture, design, urban design and planning, design education, landscape architecture and the arts).
A few years ago, alone or with other design scholars (see the list of publications below) she studied research education at some Nordic and various other European schools of architecture and design. These studies documented a growing interest among both practitioners and design academia for new epistemological stances where creative practice can be a point of departure, offering new ways of argumentation in field-specific research and research education. The knowledge issues in design scholarship had to be reconsidered with regard to the traditional relations between design fields and the academic disciplines that studied them. An opportunity to discuss these matters was offered by the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture (Brussels and Ghent) where a new design scholarship based on design practice has been broadly debated in the context of research education.
A model for an independent unit of such education has been developed by Professor Fredrik Nilsson (Chalmers University of Technology) and Halina Dunin-Woyseth (AHO and Chalmers University of Technology). This model was found to have the potential to strengthen PhD students’ intellectual identity in their practice-based research. The main principles of the model are being tested in a research education programme at the Institute of Conservation in Gothenburg. This programme was launched at the end of 2010 and is being executed by Associate Professor Ulrich Lange (Gothenburg University) and Halina Dunin-Woyseth (AHO and Gothenburg University) in 2011.
The following publications elucidate how the research project has developed and how new insights with regard to new design scholarship have been brought about over time:
Halina Dunin-Woyseth, (2011) “Some Notes on Mode 1 and Mode 2: Adversaries or Dialogue Partners?” in The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, eds. Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson (London and New York: Routledge.
Halina Dunin-Woyseth & Fredrik Nilsson, “On the emergence of Research by Design and Practice- based Research Approaches in Architectural and Urban Design” in Design Innovation for the Built Environment. Research by Design and the Renovation of Practice, ed. Michael Hensel (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
Halina Dunin-Woyseth & Fredrik Nilsson, (2011) “Building (Trans)Disciplinary Architectural Research” in Transdiciplinary Knowledge Production in Architecture and Urbanism. Towards hybrid modes of inquiry, eds. Isabelle Doucet & Nel Janssens , Wien: Springer.
Halina Dunin-Woyseth & Fredrik Nilsson, “Research by Design: Progress in establishing field-specific research in architecture and design – an update on four national scenes” in Reflections +15, ed. Gudrun De Maeyer (Brussels-Ghent: Sint-Lucas Architectuur, 2011).
Halina Dunin-Woyseth & Fredrik Nilsson, “An Emerging Research Culture – Building Doctoral Scholarship in Architecture and Design at Sint-Lucas” in Reflections +13, eds. Adam Jakimowicz et al. (Brussels-Ghent: Sint-Lucas Architectuur, 2010).
Halina Dunin-Woyseth & Fredrik Nilsson, “Visual thinking as bridge building – Testing a pedagogical concept, drawing some new insights” in Reflections +9, eds. Sarah Martens et al. (Brussels-Ghent: Sint-Lucas Architectuur, 2009).
Halina Dunin-Woyseth, ”Om ‘tenkelige’ og ‘utenkelige’ doktorgrader. Tre synsvinkler på doktorgradsrelatert akademisk utvikling i arkitektur”. In Nordisk Arkitekturforskning, 1/2009, pp. 72-87.
Halina Dunin-Woyseth & Liv Merete Nielsen,”Et aspekt ved ’doctorateness’” in: FormAkademisk Vol.2, No2 (2009)
Halina Dunin-Woyseth (2009) On designed knowledge artefacts. A Case of diagram construction in research education for practitioners. in “Communicating (by) Design”, Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, Brussels, J. Verbeke and A. Jakimowicz (eds.).
Halina Dunin-Woyseth & Fredrik Nilsson (2009) Building a culture of doctoral scholarship in architecture and design – A Belgian – Scandinavian case. Extended abstract, in: UK Council for Graduate Education and Middlesex University, pp. 24-26
Halina Dunin-Woyseth (2008) More Than a Quarter of a Century: the Doctoral Programme at the Oslo School of Architecture. FormAkademisk, Vol. 1, No 1 (2008).
Halina Dunin-Woyseth & Fredrik Nilsson, “Some notes on practice-based architectural design research: four ‘arrows’ of knowledge, Reflections +7, Research Training Sessions 2007, Arnaud Hendrickx, Nel Janssens, Sarah Martens, Tomas Nollet, Jo Van Den Berghe, Johan Verbeke (eds.), (Brussels: Hogeschool voor Wetenschap & Kunst Sint-Lucas), 2008, pp. 138 – 147.
Halina Dunin-Woyseth (2007) Research education for African PhD students 2002 – 2006.
Examining Five Levels of the Curriculum. in: AHO Research Magazine Vol. 8 / 2007
Halina Dunin-Woyseth (2007) The Making Disciplines in various knowledge landscapes, in: Paisaje Cultural – Cultural Landscape, Proceedings from the EURAU 2008 (European
Research in Architecture and Urbanism) Ministerio de Fomento, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid.
Ingun B. Amundsen, Halina Dunin-Woyseth and Inger Lise Syversen (eds.) Developments in African doctoral research at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, AHO Research Magazine,Vol. 8 / 2007
Henrik Karlsson, Halina Dunin-Woyseth, Kirsten Langkilde og Pentti Pavolainen (2007)
Kontext – kvalitet – kontinuitet. Utvärdering av Vetenskapsrådets anslag till forskning och konstnärlig utveckling 2001 – 2005, Vetenskapsrådets rapportserie, 6:2007.
Halina Dunin-Woyseth & Fredrik Nilsson, “Thinking, Doing, Writing, Researching – The Brussels experiments in forms and processes of knowledge” in Reflections +3.
Research Training Sessions 2006, ed. Nel Janssens et al. (Brussel-Gent: Sint-Lucas Architectuur, 2006).
Adrian Forty, Halina Dunin-Woyseth, Thomas A. Markus, Ann Whiston Spirn, Niels Albertsen, Roderick Lawrence, Evaluation of Swedish Architectural Research 1995 – 2005. FORMAS Rapport R7:2006.
Halina Dunin-Woyseth (2005) Architectural Scholarship ‘the Doctorate Way’ – Some Challenges and Responses in a Scandinavian Context in: Lena Villner & Abdellah Abarkan (eds.) The Four Faces of Architecture – on the Dynamics of Architectural Knowledge, Stockholm: Royal Institute of Technology.