Transformative participation and collaborative practice-led design research

In Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture, Rory Hyde (2012) speculates on a range of trajectories for architectural practice from the “environmental medic” to the “near future inventor.” These profiles imagine roles that span disciplines from architecture and urban design, to sociology, politics and the creative arts, highlighting the increasing interdisciplinarity of design practices. This reflects a diverse range of emergent creative and spatial practices in the fields of research and design that are increasingly central to design practice and pedagogy.

Although the design studio has traditionally formed the key domain of architectural practice, increasingly, “design research” is emerging as a specific mode of creative engagement. Design research provides a form of “critical spatial practice,” that can be both collaborative and transformative (Rendell, 2013, p. 119). In contrast to traditional modes of design or research that explore defined problems with the aim of producing solutions, Peter Downton (2003) notes that design research is “a way of inquiring, a way of producing knowing and knowledge” (p. 1).

This paper explores collaborative practice-led design research that engages with real world issues through research-based teaching, promoting open-ended exploration and enquiry. Rather than focusing on architecture as a process of problem solving that aims to produce built formal or spatial solutions, this paper explores the field of “dispositif-architecture,” which is “made out of relations and…generates relations” (Dascălu, 2013, p. 208). It explores collaborative practice-led design research projects that engage local communities through strategic design, which according to Brian Boyer (as cited in Hyde, 2012, p. 138) “gives shape to decisions rather than objects or buildings.” Drawing on Jeremy Till’s ideal of “transformative participation,” which provides a catalyst for new modes of practice that “expos[e] the limits of normative architectural methods,” the paper considers how collaborative practice-led design research can recast the architect as an “urban curator,” facilitating collaboration to address a range of urban spatial issues in diverse ways (Till, 2005, p. 11).