A Time for Designing

image by Carlo Leonardi ‘Experiencing the Post-mining Wonder: Reclaiming a New Purpose for Post-mining Landscapes in Quadrilatero Ferrifero’.

 

In this open access issue of Landscape Review, the discipline’s first issue dedicated to the theme of designing and landscape architecture research, we seek to support the building momentum evident in the different research cultures that exist within landscape architecture’s international community and many of those already focused on designing. The authors who responded to our call for this themed issue have been selected to represent a diversity of approaches.

Vol 18 No 1 (2018): A Time for Designing, editors Mick Abbott and Paul Roncken

Quotes from the editorial:

Internationally, the tendency towards using designing and design in landscape architecture research is growing. Yet many still perceive designing as unscientific and as a form of practice rather than a method of inquiry. As a result, it is strongly critiqued and challenged by researchers who seek to determine the validity of research methods across the discipline of landscape architecture.

[…] design as a method of inquiry is, in our view, being underused, misused and misled, and becoming part of a miscellaneous department of lost and found. […] we sense it is long overdue for design and designing to be generously welcomed into landscape architecture’s programmes of research.

Landscape architecture, with its current low status in terms of H-indices, its slight impact in wider programmes of research and its relatively small number of scholars, is arguably seeking to do too much. Instead of trying to achieve the impossible – to simultaneously and rapidly build an accredited peer review system (and with it methodological rigour and scientific acceptance in an increasingly demanding regulatory realm) and at the same time offer a capable and feasible set of alternatives for the great challenges the sciences tell us lie ahead – researchers in landscape architecture should make a call as to where they might serve best. We consider this place to be designing and all the connotations and innovations that surround its activity.

 

Source: Landscape Review