ACADEMIC RESEARCH IN AREAS OF DESIGN PRACTICE:
ARCHITECTURE

The paper will report on a study that considers the existence of a sub-group of academic research that is particular to areas of design practice: Practice-based Research (PbR). This sub-group is recognized in Europe but is  not universally recognised elsewhere, and it has raised a number of discussions about the best way of approaching the outcomes that are considered, within the dominant models of academic research, to be non-traditional. The issue of PbR in architecture is being considered in a comparative study of Swedish and Brazilian cases, in which a critical analysis of the production of doctoral theses that were completed from 2000 to 2005 in those two countries are being studied. The sample comes from theses on architecture that were produced in that period in the Swedish universities of Lund, Stockholm and Göteborg, and FAUUSP in São Paulo, Brazil. A method for identifying and evaluating PbR is being developed in the first phase of this Swedish government-funded international collaborative project.

The research aims to respond to the question: Is academic research that is developed in areas of design practice in some way different from the dominant models of academic research? The objectives of the research are to (1) identify, within the sample of PhD theses on architecture from Sweden and Brazil, examples where the traditional research criteria satisfy and did not satisfy the needs that are expressed in the areas of design practice, (2) evaluate whether any inadequacies in the dominant models of academic research are due to the nature of design practice and the particular concepts that are adopted in these areas, and whether, in the case of the adequacy of the dominant models of academic research, this agreement is due to the existence of shared concepts in the dominant model of research and design practice and (3) will make recommendations for ways of bringing similar albeit terminologically different concepts closer and ways of reconciling those concepts that are fundamentally opposed to one another.