About the Architecture Research Group (ARG)

The Architecture Research Group (ARG) has been established to address both methodological and thematic concerns within design and practice based research.

Niedderer (2007) has argued that practice is being used as a means of making tacit knowledge available to research, because it includes the experiential part of knowledge that evades conventional communication by verbal or textual means, and which is otherwise neglected by research because of the prioritisation of propositional knowledge. Within this, tacit (Emmons 2014), unquantifiable but spatially explicit architectural ways of knowledge, reflective practice (Schon 1984) becomes a key epistemological framework that bridges practice with theory.

Architecture connects the arts, humanities, engineering, politics, philosophy, and research with non-traditional design-based methodologies or outputs is an emerging interdisciplinary area that is growing rapidly as both an academic research discipline and mode of practice with many opportunities for research contributions and collaborations with far-reaching impact.

Design-based research is based on the notion of iterative design experiments that focus simultaneously on the cyclical enhancement of instructional interventions through formative evaluation and the refinement of related instructional theory (Barab & Squire, 2004; Brown, 1992; Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003; Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2004). Design-based research, and architectural design-led research in particular, is a field of knowledge production that has gained a remarkable amount of attention and momentum over the past thirty years.