Our position is that all the aforementioned, although still relevant, rests explicitly and/or implicitly on a hierarchical anthropocentrism; the ‘world-for-us’, the ‘world-in-itself’. The question therefore that our prototypes construct is to address the planet as ‘world-without-us’.
by Claudia Pasquero and Emmanouil Zaroukas
published in aae 2016 research based education, Volume One, p. 96-108
In contemporary academic environments progressive architects and urban designers struggle to cope with the prevalent paradigm of research, which still rests on the well-established problem-solution couple. Lately, emphasis is given to ‘research by design’ that, although it accounts for the peculiarities of design as research method, it does not break with the presuppositions in the way research is pursued. In this paper we recognize the prevalence of two paradigms in research. One that starts with a well-posed research question and seeks an optimal solution and another that originates from an ill-defined problem and potentially leads to a plethora of solutions.
We argue that neither the optimal solution neither a variation of answers secures the imperative of novelty and relevancy of knowledge that can fuel practice and academia. The methods of delimitation of research by specifying the problem a priori in the form of a research question seems to be obsolete since it suggests a research that finds its innovative trope in a space of possibilities already given by the way the question is posed. In this sense design, it can be argued, is degraded to an operative medium for the exploration of that space.
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