Network for (doctoral) Design-driven and artistic research reviewing
Established in 2017
 

The CA²RE Community for Artistic and Architectural Research is an open network that aims to improve Design-driven and artistic research quality through intensive peer-reviewing at critical stages. The CA²RE conferences bring together senior staff, advanced researchers and early-career researchers to understand, scrutinise and enhance the quality of research through intensive peer reviews. We wish to contribute to the open and diverse fields of architectural, design and artistic research. This openness includes environmental design, sustainable development, interior design, landscape architecture, urban design/urbanism, music, performing arts, visual arts, product design, social design, interaction design, and others.
 

Design-driven and artistic research (DDr) comprises various forms of research in architecture, design and the arts that implement design and artistic thinking and activities to generate and disseminate knowledge. DDr is an inclusive term that covers a range of approaches such as Artistic Research, Research by Design, Practice-Driven/-Based/-Led Research, and Creative Practice Research. CA²RE develops an experiential research evaluation environment that explicates the transformative and innovative power of highly individual strategies in artistic research. It addresses the diversity of research traditions and the integrative nature of architectural design research to face the current knowledge fragmentation of humanities, social sciences and technology. It highlights the interdisciplinary relevance of convergent thinking, mastering wicked problems, open-ended processes, resilience and risk, and orientation to the future, all featured in DDr. It unfolds the didactic relevance of DDr for training creative professionals to use the integrative power of design thinking to master open-ended processes while solving contemporary spatial challenges (sociological, climate-change-related, political).

The CA²RE Community was established in Spring 2017. It has since developed through the biannual CA²RE Conferences, organised by several European universities in association with ARENA (Architectural Research European Network Association), EAAE (European Association for Architectural Education), and ELIA (European League of Institutes of the Arts). From 2019 to 2022, a group of CA²RE partners established CA²RE+ (Collective Evaluation of Design-Driven Doctoral Training Strategic Partnership), an ERASMUS+-funded Strategic Partnership that builds on the experiences of the CA²RE community to systematically develop the quality and evaluation of Design-driven research. Prof. Matthias Ballestrem has been a core member of this network and a regular reviewer and panellist on these conferences since 2017. During his guest professorship in Building Construction and Design at the Institute for Architecture at TU Berlin, he chaired the 4^th CA²RE Conference, held on 28 September–1 October 2018. Later, during his professorship in Architecture and Experimental Design at HCU Hamburg, he chaired the 9^th CA²RE Conference, held on 24–28 March 2021. The 20^th CA²RE conference will be held at Leibniz University Hannover, Faculty of Architecture and Landscape, on 26–28 March 2026.

More information on the network, including materials and proceedings, here: https://ca2re.eu.
More information on the upcoming 20^th CA²RE conference in Hannover here: https://hannover.ca2re.eu

Image credits: 6th CA2RE Conference at KU Leuven, Belgium, October 2019. Work by Dr Maja Zander. Photo via ca2re.eu/events/ghent-2019/.