Pedagogy 2025
Abstract
The paper explores the creative capacity and instrumentalisation of integrative approaches to research by design methods in architecture. The outcomes of a transdisciplinary pedagogic experiment triangulating anthropological methods, spatial production, and research practices, point towards new frameworks of socio-spatial enquiry. While applied social sciences, had a huge impact in human centric architectural design discourse, we argue that the creative potential of methodological exchange has not been thoroughly explored. In the era of increasing fragmentation of knowledge, methodological instruments become crucial in connecting the dots. The experiment took place between 2020-24 at the Liverpool Architecture School involving students and academics, visual anthropologists and artists. The process was based on testing research methodological tools. In search of new collaborative instruments of communication, findings of this disciplinary interchange were both procedural and linguistic. By superimposing two disciplinary modus operandi, the linear process of inquiry involving investigation-assumption, analysis-test, findings-conclusions, interpretation-representation, reflection-impact; turned into an iterative loop. This allowed the representational processes to become part of the investigation where tools, media and sources were interchangeable. We identified a glossary of terminology, essential to the development of an operational language. The operationalisation of key terms(and their multiple meanings) allowed to mediate the complexity of the studied place, or phenomenon. Through examples, our paper introduces the dynamics of the interaction between social scientific and architectural approaches raised in the individual and collaborative creative production. We provide insights into the moderated, joint creative process in which representational tools are used to analyse and interpret content simultaneously as means to generate new ideas.
Johanna is an architect, landscape architect, Senior Lecturer in Architecture, and M.Arch lead at the Architecture School University of Liverpool. Her research focuses on urban housing design standards, inclusive design.She is the director of Project Home, the Housing Research Cluster and the MSc. in Global Housing Design. She is co-leading a research project titled Designing for Neurodiversity, funded by the UKRI, AHRC Curiosity Award.As an educator she is interested in research driven strategies and the implementation of interdisciplinary methods to housing design pedagogies.
Katalin Soós DLA is a visual artist and cultural anthropologist lives and works in Barcelona and Budapest. She was teaching esthetical anthropology, visual anthropology and qualitative methodologies (2013-2017). She is doctorated at Fine Art Academy Budapest and studied at Facultat de Bellas Artes in Universitat Politecnica de Valencia. She is Phd candidate in sociology ( Doctoral School of Sociology – ELTE, interdisciplinary program). Her research fields are: visual methodologies in anthropological researches, transition in artist’s strategies and practices, migrant strategies. Specifically she is focusing on creative processes in a comparative analysis. Using various creative and visual anthropological methods, she explores how a dialogue emerges among artists from different cultural backgrounds through their works and their personal interpretations.
5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Wednesday 19th November, 2025