Design as Research
| Description | Fourth Year Studio |
| Date | Spring 2006 |
| Affiliation | SALA, Arizona State University |
“As a biological designer, until I can actually design something, I don’t understand it.”
—Drew Endy ( BioBricks engineer)
As architects
we understand by making. This means that we use design itself as an investigative tool. So what is design research?
The project began with two quick design problems.
- A set of sites in Ecuador, with varying physical contexts (urban, natural).
- Props, with less tangible contexts including cultural (memory, war) and physical forces (gravity, weathering).
The students looked together at the studio responses to these tasks and came up with ways to study design itself. After a month we mounted an exhibition of the work, and what we discovered is that each study brought out the unique ability of design to make visible the invisible connections between things.
Inspired by this way of working together and by our findings, we decided to take on two longer design problems (see below).
Related Projects
invisible science and intangible heritage.