Although Mäkelä’s article is neither recent nor well-known, I include it within the bibliography because it closely aligns with my own notions of how the praxis component of the “Directions for Archival Interfaces in Virtual Reality” project should be positioned. Mäkelä, a ceramic artist and associate professor at Aalto University, provides a succinct and accessible overview to the field of practice-led (design) research, though the brevity of the article requires her to assume a degree of familiarity on the part of the reader with the experience of art or design practice. As a companion to the other two books, it introduces design research in a third disciplinary context – within fine arts – and attests to the pluralistic nature of the field. Given that the current stage of the project is aimed at developing a prototype, Laurel’s and Blessing and Chakrabarti’s texts offer more in the way of concrete steps for embarking on the process – but Mäkelä’s article critically articulates a conceptual stance for the project, one in which the act of making is a process of inquiry and the product created is not only evidence of that process but also an argument (159). Moreover, her brief summary of the theoretical origins of practice-led research hints at the further possibilities presented by incorporating ‘designerly ways of knowing’ into archival theory and practice, which is regrettably outside of the current scope of the project.

In describing the role of artefacts in practice-led research, Mäkelä makes a distinction between “the constructive, solution-focused thinking of the artist or the designer” from the analytic, problem-based thinking associated with verbal and numerical communication (159). While the act of making is understood as a consequence of thinking in conventional research, “invention comes before theory” in practice-led research (159). Mäkelä describes a ‘retrospective look,’ or the act of setting the artefact and the creative process that generated it within a theoretical framework for interpretation (161); in establishing the steps of the design research process for the current project, then, the ‘retrospective look’ may play a key role. At one point, Mäkelä proposes that the artefact is not only an answer to a research question and argumentation on the topic, as established by existing literature on practice-led research, but also “a method of collecting and preserving information and understanding” (158). She does not, unfortunately, elaborate upon her hypothesis but for the recordkeeping profession, it is a provocative idea worth investigating.