Abstract
This paper examines the PhD onboarding process as a site of co-creation and relational design between supervisor and student. Drawing on first-person experience, we present a series of collaboratively annotated and devised documents - The Table of Supervisory Style, Competency Profile Form, Competency Development Trajectory, A Gentlewoman’s Agreement, and Marching Orders - as performative artefacts that structure dialogue, reflection, and trust-building in supervision. These practices have emerged within an industrial design context at a university of technology, where institutional expectations intersect with creative and emergent modes of inquiry. We argue that onboarding can function as a design-led intervention: a process that materialises values, negotiates positionality, and reconfigures traditional hierarchies of academic supervision. Through the deliberate use of ambiguity, reflexivity, and value articulation, the process cultivates spaces of mutual learning and identity formation. The resulting framework positions supervision as an ongoing design practice that evolves through shared authorship, understanding, and critical awareness.
Keywords
PhD, Reflexive Supervision, Relationality, Agreements
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1985
Citation
Milne, H., and Andersen, K. (2026) A gentlewoman’s agreement: Designing relational frameworks for PhD supervision, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1985
Creative Commons License
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Included in
A gentlewoman’s agreement: Designing relational frameworks for PhD supervision
This paper examines the PhD onboarding process as a site of co-creation and relational design between supervisor and student. Drawing on first-person experience, we present a series of collaboratively annotated and devised documents - The Table of Supervisory Style, Competency Profile Form, Competency Development Trajectory, A Gentlewoman’s Agreement, and Marching Orders - as performative artefacts that structure dialogue, reflection, and trust-building in supervision. These practices have emerged within an industrial design context at a university of technology, where institutional expectations intersect with creative and emergent modes of inquiry. We argue that onboarding can function as a design-led intervention: a process that materialises values, negotiates positionality, and reconfigures traditional hierarchies of academic supervision. Through the deliberate use of ambiguity, reflexivity, and value articulation, the process cultivates spaces of mutual learning and identity formation. The resulting framework positions supervision as an ongoing design practice that evolves through shared authorship, understanding, and critical awareness.