Digital fabrication as practice-based PhD : tangible speculation into ways of making and representing architecture

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Over the past decade or more, the concept of ‘practice-based research’ has gained greater clarity and legitimacy as a specific subset of architectural design research, which “can be described as the processes and outcomes of inquiries and investigations in which architects use the creation of projects, built or un-built, or else broader contributions toward design thinking, as the central constituent in a process which also involves the more generalised research activities of thinking writing, test, verifying, debating, disseminating, perform, validating, etc.” (Fraser, 2015: 40). A significant model for the architectural practice-based PhD has been developed through RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), spearheaded by Professor Leon van Schaik in 1986, and facilitated through twice-yearly symposia held in Melbourne, Vietnam, and Ghent/Barcelona. Many Australian and European universities are presently undertaking this mode of delivery on the basis of the RMIT model.