From Practice to PhD

Increasingly, both industry and government see today’s challenge less as a need to generate more knowledge than of making effective and equitable use of what is already available. Studies on mechanisms for knowledge exchange in other domains tend to start from the implicit or explicit assumption that knowledge is produced by academics and thus necessarily flows from academia to industry. The paper starts by arguing that, in case of architecture, this flow should be at least bidirectional: from academia to practice, but also the other way around. In order to show how the latter may work, the paper subsequently reports on a recent example of knowledge flowing from architectural practice to academic research, without tending to blur the identities of both or erode their difference. The example builds upon Building Stories, an experimental course at the University of California-Berkeley that tries to unlock the knowledge capital embodied by architectural practice through storytelling. The methodology and resulting stories turn out to provide researchers with a unique resource to study design and designers “in the wild”. By way of illustration, the paper zooms in on the research of three Berkeley Ph.D. students that study quite different aspects of design: the influences of collaboration in the architectural profession, the role of ethics in design practice, and the specific nature of architectural knowledge.status: publishe