What is a project?
[what follows is thinking out loud. these are research questions. other smart people have asked these for designerly domains. I’m thinking them through for myself]
- What are the dimensions of a project’s possibility space?
- What are the boundaries between what is, and is not, the project?
- What is the relationship between the paper, the documentation, the presentation, and the project itself?
- (how do we perform a) Calibration of expectations? (ours as faculty and theirs’ as student/aspirant)
- (how do we form a) Calibration of capabilities (their extant and their target)
(as an adjudicator) Is it better to say “no” than to say “yes”? - (I have the expectation that) The student has to make a thing.(?)
- What are explorations of the known? and known by whom?
- What are the ways to traverse the terrains?
- What is “Artistic Research” in this case?
- What is the basis of evidence in a project?
- How is the evidence communicated?
- How are we to handle organic float, or shift,, or dynamism in the time between proposal and actualization?
Making as epistemology
according to Ian Horswill making is a fundamentally different mode of inquiry, at minute 13 of his talk at UC Santa Cruz. This is in evidence in the structures of the academies, segregating studio arts from scholarship. Is there a single epistemology of making? What are the epistemologies of making, if there should be more than one?