Talk Series: Supporting and discussing with Andrea his upcoming 50% seminar

This talk session on March 23, 2021, we focused on Andrea Conti and his PhD project on the design studio teaching that is part of professional design education programs. Andrea is particularly curious of understanding how social practices and training rituals developed in design studios overtime.

The conversation sparked many questions particular to Andrea’s project, but also inspired further conversation of questions relevant to us all, such as:

• What controls the direction and content of your work (supervisor, yourself, societal factors such as covid-19, etcetera), and how can we deal with this?
• How can we understand our own progress in our projects? What constitutes being or feeling “half way there” in terms of for example a 50% seminar? Courses, fieldwork, articles, chapter in a monograph? Settling in with certain theories, methodologies? When can we expect all of this to happen?
• What do we actually want to change in the world?
• What is the overarching question? What is it that we do not know? What we need to know? We can see what we do not know but what it is that you want to learn?
• Theory works on several levels; meta, miso, and micro. Where are we in making these connections and making sense of them? And how can we learn the skills in moving between empirical analytics and speak back to the theories, discourses and debates we interact with in our projects?
• Who are you talking to in this thesis? Who do you want to have a debate with practically and theoretically?

This format of informally hearing more about each other’s project, opening up a floor for curious questions and reflective answered again proved successful given the restrictions of online meetings we are all experiencing.

We all wish Andrea the best of luck for his upcoming 50% seminar!