Public defence, Visual Communication Design, MFA Laureen Mahler

Title of the thesis: Making/Space: A Holistic Approach to Designing through Interdisciplinary Practice

Thesis defender: Laureen Mahler
Opponent: Prof. Mika Elo, University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland
Custos: Prof. Masood Masoodian, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture

This thesis develops a holistic concept of designing through practice-led research, investigating the author’s practice in origami and papermaking. In doing so, it considers craft practices as a vital source of knowledge as well as a basis for interdisciplinary research. The research questions that guide this work ask how spatial engagement in craft-driven practices facilitates development of a holistic concept of designing, and, furthermore, how the corresponding insights can be abstracted to address current challenges within the field of design research as well as in the broader discipline of design. Accordingly, the research presented moves from the field and laboratory to the workshop and studio, with material-driven inquiry as a common thread that unites approaches from design, art, mathematics, and paper science.

The work is characterized by a synthetic and analytic approach to materials exploration, with spatial engagement serving as a framework for understanding how a holistic concept of designing might be developed. Aspects of ecological relationality, craft theory, perceptual psychology, and computational thinking are intertwined to form an interdisciplinary perspective that emphasizes both theory and practice: knowing by doing. Unifying the thesis as whole is an examination of folding and origami, through which spatial engagement is observed and analyzed. Folding an origami corrugation is simultaneously material and conceptual, geometric and topological, and comprised of dynamic relations among unit cells from which a functional whole emerges. The origami corrugation takes into account parts-to-whole relationships as well as the act of assembling the whole. It is a Gestalt in every sense of the word, and an embodiment of knowledge derived from entangling cognition and physical action.

Through material exploration, folding, and spatial engagement, this thesis presents design as designing: active, integrated, and relational.

Keywords: practice-led research, holistic designing, relationality, formal emergence, spatial engagement, dynamic patterns, interdisciplinary practice

Thesis available for public display 7 days prior to the defence at Aalto University's public display page.