Design for Discovery:
Graduate Media Design’s Approach to Research

In the Graduate Media Design Program, we believe that the act of designing is a unique way of knowing about the world. As designers, we create objects and communications that inform, influence, and alter everyday life. In the process of making, we visualize, iterate, and critique, and we believe that it is through these activities that designers can gain unique insights and generate new ideas and artifacts. This approach is built into both the curriculum and faculty research activities.

Design led by inquiry is another way to think about designing as research. We believe that design-driven investigations can generate new ways of thinking about design, new insights into people and their daily practices, and new approaches or methods for invention. At the same time we value applied research that brings new knowledge to life. The output of our research activities takes the form of not only conference papers and publications, but also new design practices, new technologies, newcommunication formats and uses, new models and methods for collaboration, and new products and services.

Summer Research Residencies
Each summer, Grad Media Design hosts 7-week or 14-week research residencies for researchers from Art Center and beyond. We establish a theme, generate a call for proposals, and convene a jury related to each summer's topic. The residency culminates in a public presentation of all summer research projects conducted in the Grad Media studio.

Each summer's resident gets studio space, a stipend, a budget, and a team of student research interns. The short duration is good for seeding projects with future potential or finishing components of ongoing research. Through this modest residency we hope to support design-led research that does not fit neatly into conventional categories for research and funding. Grad Media Design students benefit through exposure to unconventional approaches to design and the production of new ideas, forms, and knowledge in the field.

Summer Research Residency 2012:
Public Display
For Summer 2012, the topic is Public Display: Space as Platform, a look at howsocial media, ubiquitous computing and satellite mapping are redefining public and private space. The Occupy movements and the Arab Spring demonstrations point to a heightened role for physical space in asserting individual and collective agency. At the same time, public space has become an edgeless media stage. Read more.

Summer Research Residency 2011:
Learning and the New Ecology of Things
For Summer 2011, we are particularly interested in projects that explore learning in a context of pervasive computing, including mobile technologies, social networking, online systems and digital media. We will consider projects for all learning situations but are most interested in post-secondary art and design education, as an extension of our New Ecology of Things initiative. Find out more.

Summer Research Residency 2010:
MADE UP: Design's Fictions
Making, making things, and making things up each describe what designers do. The last of these – typically associated with crackpots and visionaries – has found new relevance for a generation of designers facing a world characterized by change on a different order of magnitude.

Research and design approaches that invite the speculative, critical, and fantastical can be as productive as they are provocative. Perhaps most interesting is the variety of implications, motivations, and applications for this sort of work – some of which we have witnessed recently as “design fiction,” as a resurgent interest in creating critical or philosophical objects, and as the use of storytelling to frame research or generate new form. Find out more.