VIRTUAL New Schools of Thought

Abstract

This paper argues that process is not only essential to the development of creative work but is the creative product. Through studying student projects produced in a material fabrication course at the American University of Sharjah’s College of Architecture, Art, and Design that take an empirical approach to learning through making, the paper examines the critical relationship between process and invention in design. Contrary to the prevalent pedagogical emphasis on the highly resolved final product, the course, Advanced Topics in Material Fabrication, focuses on material investigation and design in response to material properties and behaviour, discovery, analysis, and making methodologies. The course places significance not on what students make, but on what happens in the process of making and the rigour of exploration. In other words, the process is the work. Making methodologies that emerge from student projects become the substance of significance. Student work is driven by a process that embraces failure, trial and error, intuition, and blind experimentation as necessary acts of exploration and discovery. Process demands that students analyze, challenge, and edit their own work in a feedback loop, in dialogue with material. The paper advocates for a pedagogical approach that fosters creative practice rooted in process-based learning that moves back and forth between production and reflection. The results of student projects in the course, Advanced Topics in Material Fabrication, demonstrate an increased ability to problem solve, invent, and most important, discover a variety of possibilities inherent in the work. Investing in process rather than final product, or, treating creative process as the product of design, leads to multiple, rather than singular outcomes. Process is an iterative continuum embedded in exploration and critical inquiry that enables ideas and methodologies to have application beyond the termination of a project.