Research at BAU
BAU Research has been created from the conviction that research is an inventive practice which can be developed with creativity and rigour. For this reason, we aim to accompany and encourage the curiosity of those of us who believe that art and design can contribute to the creation of a better world.
Art and design are environments in which images, artefacts, discourses, sensibilities and worlds are imagined and created. Research is the tool that allows us to understand them and, therefore, to care for them.
We understand the research as a space in which dialogues between heterogeneous matters, ideas and lives can be fostered. For this purpose, we encourage creative and experimental practices capable of exploring materials, languages, concepts, bodies, technologies and forms of life, through research projects, doctoral theses, books, essays or technological prototypes.
We are committed to research that is understood as a transformative practice. We believe that social transformation emerges from the desire to confront forms of injustice, privilege and inequality. Radical imagination is the first step to enter into what is yet to be known, into the worlds that are yet to be built.
The world is not waiting to be researched, we create the world each time we collectively ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live in. We share practices and ideas seeking to produce new meanings, new imaginaries, fairer markets and more sustainable lives.
…social transformation emerges from the desire to confront forms of injustice, privilege and inequality.
Research Groups and Units
GREDITS
BAU currently has a research group called GREDITS (Grup de Recerca en Disseny i Transformació Social)( (SGR-514) which is recognised as a consolidated group by AGAUR (SGR 2017-2019).
Formed by a multidisciplinary group of professors of the Degree in Design, GREDITS is a collective research platform whose aim is to analyse, from a critical perspective, how social and technical changes impact on the form, concept and function of art and design.
Its main research lines are:
- Exploration of new genealogies of art and design, including narratives of historical memory.
- Design, ecology and gender as factors that are reflected in recent creative practices and theories.
- New pedagogies and methodologies of research and teaching in art, design and the humanities.
IMP – Institute of Political Materialities
In turn, BAU hosts a research unit called IMP (Institute of Political Materialities) active since September 2020.
It is a space created to host and promote research and experimentation of projects based on creative practices between art, design, technology, science and the social.
IMP is currently working to connect different fields of knowledge through four trans and indisciplinary areas of work:
- Caring in collective: where community health, affections and bodies are brought together.
- Learning in action: where attention, presence and knowledge in action articulate ways of transmitting and creating knowledge.
- Bodies and artefacts: where exploring, experimenting and creating other limits of the body, the environment and movement.
- Instituting matters: where atoms, bits, essences and agencies come together to generate new tangible possibilities of the world.
In addition, each area of work includes different practices approached critically and creatively:
- Design of experiments
- Tools that teach
- Recording and documentation
- Prototyping
- Radical interdependencies
- Creative methodologies
PhD Unit
BAU’s Doctoral Unit organises the academic and administrative management of the activities related to doctoral studies, and was created with the aim of supporting and promoting the doctoral theses that are being developed at the centre. It is a space created to foster research, facilitate the exchange of knowledge and promote cooperation within the BAU research community.
Networks, Partnerships and Certifications
Partnerships
Collaborations
BAU Research carries out its research work thanks to a large number of public and private collaborations. If you are a company, association or research center and you are interested in proposing or designing a joint research project, do not hesitate to contact us.