Research + Creative Practice

Research and creative practice at Taubman College spans the full spectrum of how design, architecture, urban and regional planning, urban design, and urban technology come to know and reshape the built environment. Our faculty, students, and staff produce new knowledge and pursue systematic inquiry into pressing societal, industry, and community challenges; they treat design itself as original research, advancing it through making, experimentation, and the disciplined integration of preferences, methods, materials, and tools. This work is exploratory and discovery-driven, but it is also deeply engaged — coordinated across labs, clusters, and initiatives, with partners across the University of Michigan and with communities and constituencies regionally and around the world. Because research means something distinct in each discipline and at each scale, the college holds these modes together rather than privileging a definitive hierarchy, asking not only what defines research but when and for whom different forms of inquiry and creative practice do their work.