Enabling Systems for Open Transformations within the Existing Built Context

The conception of the research project has started from a necessity, identified during past architectural design projects within the last years of my practise and it is aligned with the methods commonly used within design based research. It has shifted between several types of research activity and involved theory and design precedents but also with a major focus this research will be based on my current architectural design process and building experiments centered around the topic of collaborative making. For the strengthening of the research culture of architecture, in my view it’s important to employ the discipline’s own methodologies in research projects. By bringing research and practise closer together as well as by implementing Design-Driven Research within design teaching in architecture new perspectives for the training of young creative professionals can emerge. This PhD project is developed following a Research-through-Design methodology which oscillates among a combination of approaches. Designs can play the role of feedbacking to a wider knowledge base, that is specific in each project but can be universal in the reflection of the different outcomes and create insights within a wider interest. While designs will become a proposal for specific questions in each project, a universal set of systems will emerge with the capacity to become combined and tested in new projects. An analytical approach in which different techniques like diagrams, a taxonometry of systems, models, and workshop-technique will be explored, will both structure knowledge and outcomes and follow the aim to scope out new fields of action within a changing field of practise.