Submitting my Thesis concludes my Context Studies for the whole of this degree, after completing Stasis in the second semester of first year.
Leafing through the final hard copy
The content of this largely follows what I presented to the group just under a month ago [see blog post Nov 20, 2019: Context Studies: Thesis – presentation], as by that stage, I had done the bulk of my reading and research. I had also spent a large amount of time prior to the presentation focusing on producing accompanying visual content, as I knew that this would be helpful to convey my ideas in the short duration of the presentation, and this has all gone into the written submission as well.
Diagram charting the evolution of the words 'catalysis' and 'catalyst', from the first main chapter of the Thesis
Taking on board verbal and written feedback from my presentation, and subsequent tutorials since then, the only major change has been in the latter stages of the work. In my presentation, I had chosen to move from the 'Street Dance' case study to creating small urban catalyst devices related to recycling issues in Leeds. I decided to depart from this, as I agreed that this didn't align as closely with the rest of the research as would be desirable.
Instead, I devoted more space to speculating on how the Street Dance performance could increase its catalytic effect, through temporal or spatial means. This is something which I touched on in my presentation, but that I have gone into more detail in over the last few weeks of writing.
A final new part to my Thesis was bringing in de Certeau's ideas of 'strategies' and 'tactics'. After setting out what these terms mean, with reference to both primary material by de Certeau and secondary readings on his work, I concluded that tactical approaches are the key to urban catalysts.
Reflection
I feel mostly happy with the written thesis that I have submitted, and feel that I have learnt a lot through the process of researching and writing both this and Stasis. I think that the area of study was more relevant to my design studio work from last year than this year, but I think that that is inevitable, due to the way that the modules are mapped over the course of the degree. In spite of that, I do think that in Thesis I was able to explore issues of urbanism which are more broadly applicable architecture than my Stasis work, which was very focused on site-specific dance specifically.
If I were to have more time to work on it further, I would want to focus my time on polished the concluding section. I think that I felt like I slightly ran out of both time and words within the accepted word count, which meant that the concluding section didn't fully bring everything else from the main body back together. Therefore, with more time, I would probably choose to refine and cut down the word count of some of the earlier sections, to allow me to expand more on the ideas of strategies and tactics, and then fully bring everything together at the end.
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