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Seminar: Research by design

The Research by Design seminar was arranged yesterday as part of the PhD school at AHO. It was a rather long day of presentations, more or less relevant to my project. The image below is from the last presentation, many had left at this point.

Chris Rust (webpage) presented A Hopeful Marriage: Artistic Inguiry in the Academy 1993-2008, and shared experiences from the UK on practice-based research. Some key points: good research practice is the one important criteria, avoid excess of theorizing, don’t create a monster, build theory through practice, own your research and argue for it, a thesis must be visible and permanent, research should be a single inquiry.

Timo Arnall & Einar Sneve Martinussen presented Touch: Designing an Internet of Things, and gave a general overview of the Touch project at AHO, described through a series of themes.

Birger Sevaldson was Being Specific about Practice Based Research in Design: An Attempt at Mapping the Field, and is in the process of mapping the field of Practice Based Research. A difficult but important task.

Michael Weinstock gave a presentation on Forms and Process in Nature and Civilisation, and showed how we can understand the emergence of cities, civilisation and information systems by looking at processes of metabolism and evolution in nature.

Michael Hensel is Constructing a Research Programme: Performance-Oriented Design along a Biological Paradigm. He is investigating the possibility of going from a function-oriented architecture to a new paradigm inspired by biology, where performativity is a key issue.

Mick Eekhout presented an example of Designing and Prototyping of a New Generation of Composite Sandwich Structures for Free Form Architecture. We got to see how technological research may be carried out in real world projects.

Børre Skodvin (Jensen & Skodvin) gave insights From Architectural Practice, on the relationship between practice and research seen from a practitioner.

Pattie Bell Hastings (webpage) presented The Misuse Manifesto, related to her artistic work in progress, with ideas related to technology and mobile misuse.

The seminar was a bit long, and except of Chris Rust and Birger Sevaldson’s presentations, there were few attempts to discuss and problematize the concepts and practices of ‘research by design’. We saw many examples that were interesting in themselves, but without being placed in a theoretical context it is hard to see how they help us to develop better theories or practices of ‘research by design’.

Tags: AHO, design, research, research by design, seminar

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