METU Department of Industrial Design has recently become a partner in a new European Union project “D.Doc” that will map doctoral design education across all 34 Erasmus+ member states. The project is funded under the “KA203Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education scheme” and locally co-ordinated by Prof. Dr. Owain Pedgley.

The first phase of the project will uncover the scope and characteristics of doctoral design education in Europe.In the first phase, the academic partners will identify the institutions across Europe where a doctoral degree in design can be studied, including a wide range of information such as research specialties, degree duration, degree type, language of instruction, and fees.

In the second phase, this information will be supplemented with specially chosen video case studies from across European institutions, telling the story of some of the doctoral graduates to inspire applicants considering a doctoral design degree in Europe. And an Open Educational Resource (OER) will be designed and tested, forming a source of information and these case studies.The Open Educational Resource will be an open-access web-based system where all the collected doctoral design information can be browsed and searched, allowing prospective students to be much more informed about the opportunities for doctoral design research across the 34 Erasmus+ countries. The process of design, prototyping, and testing of the Open Educational Resource, to fit the needs of prospective students, will form a continuous part of the project all the way through to its launch at the project end.

Loughborough University (UK) is the lead partner, with other partners being Aalto University (Finland), Sapienza University (Italy) and ATIT (commercial partner, Belgium). The project is due for completion in December 2022, with a total project budget of € 297,624.