M.ARCH DESIGN LECTURE SERIES: SPECULATIVE INVESTIGATIONS

Architecture has to go beyond the design of unique singular buildings.
The task at hand is to design for the future in response to emergent need and the challenge for studios is in rethinking current norms. Questioning in itself is a mode of thinking to develop a framework for research in order to identify a design aim for the project. Research is not trawling data. It is for the purpose of defining the design target. Whilst data forms the basis of research hypothesis, design involves concepts which make sense of the data by postulation and by intuition.

Designers operate in a mode of questioning and suspend synthesis until there is sufficient breadth of design considerations to arrive at an ordering diagram, a schema. The representation of a plan or a model to embody a concept can be understood as a design schema. The task of design synthesis is to seek first the schema and not a single solution. With this schema, design investigations probe into a set of conditions to generate different solutions. We can simulate and compare a range of outcomes, to study how and why they perform differently with different configurations.

But can speculation be part of design questioning?

Design investigations are speculative when predicting conditions in the future, when imagining our environments to change perspectives beyond those limited by experience. Speculations on future conditions may start by projecting scenarios from current data. It may begin with a physical configuration to initiate an iterative process of simulations and modifications. Design oscillates between intuitive and interrogative modes of thinking to arrive at design prototypes, the outcome of speculative investigations.