Reading, Writing, Making Sense: Research for Beginners

Our ways of approaching our fields and disciplines as professionals stem, to a great extent, from our own practice, from the immediate environment. With this understanding, all our previous exercises have been geared towards developing a habit of engaging more closely and attentively with the reality around us, asking pointed questions and being able to draw inferences and to articulate these. 

However, no matter how rich our own practice and experience become over the years, they need to be anchored in the existing body of practice, to take into account other designers’, architects’, urban planners’ ways of responding to the world. While interaction with our contemporaries provides direct access to a community of learning, research forms the basis for the positions we are able to take, and for our ability to identify common ground for discussion with other professionals.

The purpose of this set of exercises is to set the stage for our future engagement with the history of our respective disciplines. It is at the same time a process of familiarization with some significant designers (irrespective of scale) and their perspectives; and more importantly a process of learning how to engage productively with the existing body of knowledge on which our disciplines draw to evolve. The intention is not to learn about the depth of disciplinary concerns, but rather to learn how to conduct research, understand the context and focus of others’ work, and articulate our standpoints and eventually critiques around them.