The CA²RE Community (Conferences for Artistic and Architectural Research) is an open network that aims to improve Design-Driven 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 research (DDr) comprises various forms of research in architecture, design and the arts that implement design 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).
We established the CA²RE Community in the spring of 2016. It has since developed through 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 2019-2022 a group of CA²RE partners established CA²RE+ (Collective Evaluation of Design Driven Doctoral Training Strategic Partnership), an ERASMUS+-funded Strategic Partnership building on the experiences of the CA²RE community to develop the quality and evaluation of Design-driven research systematically. The Aarhus event will be the 13th CA²RE conference.
