Critical Making with Aluminium Sandcasting: Design Practice into Practice-led Research.

This paper appraises design practice as research and how my own work continues to transform into practice-led research. I have worked as an academic and designer-maker of furniture and related products for 25 years. While I have gained much in personal new knowledge and insights it is only recently that I have begun to view my work as practice led-research. Some of the work discussed here has already been shown as an exhibition submission at The ADAPT-r Creative Practice Conference: Making Research – Researching Making (Arkitektskolen Aarhus, Sept 2015), with an accompanying short paper (Lambert 2015) cross-referencing my practice with key texts and the practice-led research of others. This paper expands key references and discusses in greater detail how design outcomes and making processes can shape a rigorous research context. Examples of my more recent work will also be discussed. From the outset I have been using new work, which is on-going, as a vehicle for exploring making as research – this is the experience of making as thinking through sand-casting with aluminium (figs. 1 and 2). Key stages of my making process – doing – have been captured in photographs and film, along with resulting casts. The prototypes have revealed new insights along with challenges (see section 4), which are also opportunities. This resonates with numerous sources on critical making discussed below and I will share my personal demystification of this with others seeking to re-shape their creative practices as research