PGTD
5130
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201130
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Faculty:
Lisa Grocott
This course runs in tandem with the Thesis Project and introduces students to the idea of practice-led research in a studio context. Students learn how designing is fundamental to research by developing a design-led approach to research that emerges from their work. The course focuses on project-specific research and on the designer researchers who advance the field. Students become familiar with design-led methods that improve research and inform design projects. They contextualize their practice as one that poses questions and responses while delivering design outcomes. Together these two objectives allow students to define a critical framework for their thesis project and acquire the tools to conduct relevant research. Students also explore strategies to understand social and technological practices and systems. Social practices are diffuse and invisible. The opportunistic and exploratory nature of design presents a solution-oriented strategy for researching and understanding complex conditions and behaviors. This strategy serves as alternative to those used in the humanities and sciences. The course requires a level of explicit understanding about how designers think through making. Students also must understand how one weds these practices with criteria for research, so that their work is purposeful, inquisitive, informed, methodical, and communicable. In training students to reflect critically on their own ways of working, the course presents a discursive, solution-oriented, performative, and multi-modal approach to practice.Open to: TDD majors; non-majors with permission
