Trends of Postgraduate Architectural Research in Thailand

Abstract

This article is a part of the research under CDAST workforce strategic planning for architectural educators, designers, and researchers. Its objective is to study trends in architectural research, by studying more than 3,000 postgraduate theses in architectural fields. In overall, the number of graduate thesis topics was correlated with the number of graduate courses offered, with more topics on architecture, followed by urban planning, interior architecture and decorative arts, and landscape architecture. The thesis topics in the keywords related to real estate had the highest proportion (18.58%), following by environmental responsive design (15.72%), architectural design (12.90%) and the keywords related to Thai architecture and architectural conservation (11.00%). As opposed to the overall Relative Importance Index (RII) through a survey of opinions on the importance of factors affecting teaching and producing graduates, real estate is on the contrary placed second from the last. It is also interesting to point out that the keywords with an important ranking on attitude or attribute, such as ethics and collaboration, were not very popular areas for research. Therefore, more consideration and encouragement of research into architectural education and professional practice should be a significant development in line with the RII trend results. A similar occurrence also happened to research related to environmental responsive design, implementation of Thai architecture, vernacular architecture and architectural conservation design in contemporary contexts, universal design, technology, and computers, which are the factors relating to the current work situation that are also ranked high on the importance scale, should be researched more as well.