Friday, February 23, 2007

Research: Project needs + Development

On the last seminar (21/02/07), we talked about research needs for our projects. We tried to identify them, expand them and interlink them in order to discover ways of expanding the projects.

‘What research needs to be done to help contextualise/ inform what you are doing?’

The main categories that were identified (in terms of areas of development and concern) are the following:

TECHNICAL
AESTHETIC
CULTURAL
SOCIAL / ECONOMIC
POLITICAL

The professional world (contemporary+historic) in graphic design and architecture, new technologies that can be explored and studied, tested and finally used, as well as the psychology of the client / designer on accepting new methods on multidisciplinary design projects, were just a few of the first questions of such a research.

In order to ‘discover’ new needs (or at least not obvious research needs) it would be a good idea to work backwards. The five categories that were mentioned before can act as targets and an expansion of their meaning could bring interesting results.

Let’s see a few images of such explorations, where each of the five words/ categories is expanded and explored through language.

'research' word map

'technical' word map

'social' word map

'political' word map

'economic' word map

'cultural' word map

'aesthetic' word map