Superpowers of Montage: A Design-Driven Research Experiment

Abstract

This paper presents one segment of a multi-part essay that investigates the ‘superpowers’ of montage. The main goal of the essay is to thoroughly examine the uncharted territories in the interspace between various disciplines - mainly architecture, but also film and other visual arts, in which montage as a technique has taken remarkably diverse forms. The aim of this particular paper is to present an interdisciplinary design-driven research experiment, which used montage technique as a design research tool. In this experiment, montage was not only used as a representation technique, rather it was employed as a main compositional and logical principle in the creative process. Therefore, this paper aims to define and describe in detail seven fairly distinct phases of design-driven research experiment. This interdisciplinary research attempts to contribute to the ongoing discussion on montage in architectural design and research, as well as to the recently established design-driven research field, which focuses on valuation of design thinking, design research methodologies and knowledge contributions made possible by design.