CA²RE+

The Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership CA²RE+ develops a collective learning environment through Evaluation of Design Driven Doctoral Training. Design Driven Doctoral research (DDDr) is taken as a multidisciplinary example of an experiential learning-through-evaluation model, appropriate for identification and promoting relevance of research singularity, its transparency and recognition, to award excellence in doctoral training for creative and culturally rooted solutions of contemporary design driven developments.

CA²RE+:
The CA2RE+ explicates the transformative and innovative power of highly individual strategies in artistic research, the diversity of research traditions and the integrative nature of architectural design research, able to face the contemporary knowledge fragmentation from humanities, social sciences and technology. It explicates the interdisciplinary relevance of convergent thinking, mastering wicked problems, open-ended processes, resilience and risk, as well as orientation to future, all present in DDDr. In the arts, architecture and design, understanding of reality aims to future creations, however convincing, remains based on a personal and creative aspect, where the relevance of singularity of particular cases plays the key role in research strategies and evaluation. The evaluation of this type of relevance requires explication of tacit knowledge and research impact evidence, including non- written production.

The CA2RE+ advances the doctoral training from being a support to an experimental collective evaluation training environment for DDDr. It critically transfers the traditional design studio learning model from the master to the doctoral level: learners at different stages of their process learn collectively with evaluators in an iterative way. The project objectives are achieved iteratively, by means of a conference series following the main project steps from observation and sharing, comparison and reflection to reformulation and recommendation. PhD candidates and their supervisors take actively part to the CA2RE+ series of conferences, that started in October 2019 and will continue up to 2022. After this period the partners intend to continue the activities through the half-yearly CA2RE Conferences on Artistic and Architectural Research.