Vladimir Mako University of Belgrade, Faculty of Architecture, Belgarde, Serbia 273
which one can acquire individual experience and knowledge, specific for the discipline,
and emphasized in architectural design education. Supporting novelty, innovation and
original thinking, architectural design research culminates in the act of creativity.
That discourse, as a complex system, conjoins speculative thought and creative force
in an active way, and therefore interacts with aesthetic intention.
The level on which research process can develop as an autonomous outcome asks for
a particular definition of the term artefact. The meaning of artefact should be estab-
lished broader and based mainly on ideas defining imaginative artefacts, performing
artefacts, or even those where they are evidencing the process. In that context, the
paper will support existing ideas defining a relatively autonomous “world” (Diaz-
Kommonen) of particular artefacts, developing it further into a state where they are
no longer evidencing the research process, but are that process, at the same time
embodying the new experience and knowledge reached through the process as a
particular concept.
Consequently, if the research process itself becomes an artefact, it should consist
of values referring mainly to researcher’s personal experience, intuition, development
of different kind of knowledge, and in principal divorced from concretely defined
functional, material and technological properties, conceptualizing ideas of a different
kind. Generally, research process can be thought as a form of processing designer’s
basic creative intention, guiding in a particular way further development of its activ-
ity, and providing variable forms of expression of ideas.
In the context of this paper and regarding the research process on which the
discussion is focused, it would be insufficient to define the designer’s intention as
an aim towards achieving a pragmatic design solution of any kind. It is more an
intention for a complex communication of ideas, where solely factual knowledge
and practical outcomes are not final means of the activity. It implements largely the
intuitive articulation and expression of sensorial values and conceptual possibilities
as broader, more abstract reflection on given conditions of a fragment of reality. In
that way design research operates on the primal stage of creative activity, starting
the process with the affective attention as the primal step of any creative intention,
ending with the concept developed on an ideal level.
This kind of design research process, especially if developed for educational pur-
poses, has its autonomous value, even if not finally separated from the one leading
towards rational definition of functional and material design properties. However, the
main implementation of intuition, imagination, speculative thinking, and subjective
and/or unconscious judgment of perceptual values, is placing this research process
closer to the field of primal creative experimentation with sensorial values, than to
the rational, functional and technological decision making.
According to these conditions, the designer’s intention in scope can be better
defined as its primal or inner aesthetic intention. Driving out from affective atten-
tion, which indicates basic relationships between sensorial values of a fragment of
reality, aesthetic intention in this context can be defined more as a process-based
activity than as a flash of a creative moment. In that sense, research process and
its outcome, which will be discussed in this paper, is also mainly different from a