Methods: How We Invent and Research

Abstract

TA D 5 : 1 E D TO R IA L “[O]ur writing tools are also working on our thoughts” summarizes Friedrich Nietzsche’s experience using one of the early typewriters: a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. His experience speaks directly to the tool-and-thought continuum evident in creative disciplines. It is also mirrored by Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” claim emphasizing the importance of the mechanism delivering the content. New tools and technologies (methods) often manifest themselves in new outcomes. While general questions remain unchanged, new methods can lead to qualitatively new answers. Thus, the focus of this issue is on how we invent, develop, and deliver new knowledge. Doris Sung advocates for expanding the entrepreneurial mindset within AEC disciplines by broadening architects’ services from exclusively client-oriented to product and building technology development. Sung uses her own experience as an inventor and developer of the InVert passively dynamic self-shading window to draw broader lessons for others following a similar path. This entrepreneurial path allows designers to respond to current and emerging social, technological, and environmental concerns by defining their own research questions and problems to solve—giving them autonomy and agency. In a voice coming from the allied discipline of civil engineering, Amy Seif Hattan demonstrates how collaborative research between an engineering firm and academia helps to validate best sustainable practices and ultimately become a catalyst for firm-wide environmentally focused transformation. The added benefit of this collaboration was the firm’s ability to offer new embodied carbon design services and gain market advantage over its competitors in addition to fostering a mutually beneficial relationship with academic researchers. In a similar way, the evidence-based design method helps practitioners to learn from their past projects and bring greater value to their clients. Galen Cranz, Lusi Morhayim, Georgia Lindsay, and Johann (Hans) Sagan emphasize the necessity of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) research in architecture, both in practice and academia, to address users’ manifest and latent needs. Christopher Pagano, Brian Day, and Leah S. Hartman expand the discussion of human factors in architecture by contextualizing it within a broader ecological psychology framework that sees people and the environment as interdependent. The authors point to affordance as a key characteristic that empirically quantifies this relationship. Precedents, either environmental performance data points or user feedback, are critical components of the architectural design process (method). William Braham in his review of Case Study Strategies for Architects and Designers by Marja Sarvimäki reiterates the importance of case studies as one of the primary architectural research methods and grounds it in a larger interdisciplinary perspective. He also reiterates the importance of research methods, and case studies in particular, considering an increased number of new research-oriented architecture programs. In the case of the DFAB HOUSE the methods and technologies synergize into a single design workflow and a fascinating structure. A visually and technologically rich contribution by Konrad Graser, Arash Adel, Marco Baur, Daniel Sanz Pont, and Andreas Thoma demonstrates bridging advanced fabrication research with construction assembly. It shows tools and methods as important drivers in the conceiving and making of architecture. This fabrication demonstrator perhaps speaks most directly to Nietzsche’s mind-to-outcome connection, where every detail and assembly is digitally resolved and actualized before it takes a physical form. A different take on fabrication is present in Blaine Brownell’s review of 3D-printed wood as a potentially new incarnation of one of the oldest and most common building materials. While its 3D-printed version may not have the same affect, it manifests new qualities and capacities. Brownell’s perspective provides a balanced and in-depth critical assessment of technical, environmental, and sensory aspects as well as possible future applications. Immersing ourselves in this TAD OPEN method issue, we should feel encouraged and empowered by the breadth of architectural research and diversity of methodologies that keep in touch with the most recent technological innovations while considering the human condition and the environment.