451 project outline - Spatial Design@Massey

451 project outline224.451: Spatial Design Research and Development [2009] p.2You are already familiar with this process from your work last year in 224.381 Theory and Practice. In project one of that paper you developed aspatial gesture and in an A4 sheet discussed it. In project two you began studio-based design explorations, analysing these in an A4 sheet, and then asyou developed the design, developing the written document and your theorisation of your design process and ideas from an initial draft to a final essay.This paper, 224.451, involves a scaling up of the processes and skills developed in 224.381.This paper allows for a range of approaches to research, but does privilege a research mode that amalgamates design and theory. It offers the potentialof rethinking theory, thinking it as active, as a kind of doing; it offers the possibility of thinking through making. You may therefore use your designmakings as a way-finding device, a means by which to track across your conceptual territory.Rebecca Horn, Finger GlovesYour documentation of this research may also be strongly inflected by the design process or theory underpinning the work. Such a design-drivenprocess helps to establish a research trajectory that takes you into Semester 2 with a strong sense of the spatial implications of your research topic orquestion. This does not disallow those who wish to write an extended scholarly essay. What is required is a suitable process, resulting in a balancebetween text, image, and artefact that is appropriate to the chosen topic and to your particular research methodology. The paper relies on self-directionthroughout this process, and you will have to organise regular consultations with your tutor/s.To summarise then in this paper you will need to:generate design experiments or outputs that critically reflect upon or highlight an issue or topic relevant to spatial designdevelop an idea or proposal or question in relation to your thinking or makingreflexively articulate and build upon that question or idea through your making and writinglocate this question/idea within a theoretical field and methodological framework [with reference to the writing of specific theorists for e.g.];locate it also within a discipline or practice [spatial/art/performance etc]and in reference to the work of others [designers/artists/crafts people etc]