Boot up your laptop, fire up your styrofoam cutter, sharpen your pencil and prepare yourself for fierce arguments defending your design to your boss and/or client. Architectural practices are complex engines that generate vast amounts of information and knowledge. Ideas are tested, models are developed, and conversations occur that can have far-reaching consequences in shaping our built environment. However, much of this knowledge produced through the process of design is implicit and difficult to articulate, leaving the nature of this knowledge and how it relates to the practices and people that create it as subjects largely underrepresented in architectural discourse.

Action! Creating knowledge through practice is the blog we have initiated in order to investigate practices’ specific forms of knowledge and organization as a means to better understanding the design process. We expect this aim to lead us into diverse territories including: collaboration, practice models, modes of reasoning, emerging technologies, media, representation, design strategies, design research, economics and even neuroscience. Above all, Action! will engage practice as a lens for looking at architecture itself.

This blog will also act as a forum for the re-digestion and extension of our respective fields of research into aspects of practice. Rory has recently completed his PhD at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology which explored the tools, strategies and organizational structures of small ICT enabled architecture offices. Similarly, Edwin’s Master thesis at Delft University of Technology investigated how creativity and intuition in design can be explained as a form of reasoning. For both of us the blog will function as a tool to extract this work from the rigourous academic context to present it in a more journalistic and speculative framework for discourse. The blog will also be a way to gather further illustrative examples and anecdotes. Finally, it will also function as a more public platform to shape a conversation between the both of us, and to sharpen our own ideas, and of course, you’re welcome to chip in.

- Edwin Gardner and Rory Hyde