Digital fabrication as practice-based PhD : tangible speculation into ways of making and representing architecture

Over the past decade or more, the concept of 'practice-based research' has gained greater clarity and legitimacy as a specific subset of architectural design research, which "can be described as the processes and outcomes of inquiries and investigations in which architects use the creation of projects, built or un-built, or else broader contributions toward design thinking, as the central constituent in a process which also involves the more generalised research activities of thinking writing, test, verifying, debating, dissemination, perform, validating, etc." (Fraser, 2015:40).