This course introduces students to the idea of practice-led research in a studio context, focusing on project-specific research and on the designer researchers who advance the field. Students become familiar with design-led methods that improve research and inform design projects. They contextualize their practice as one that poses questions and responses while delivering design outcomes. Together these two objectives allow students to define a critical framework for their thesis project and acquire the tools to conduct relevant research. This course also requires a level of explicit understanding about how designers “think through making.” Students will explore strategies to understand social and technological practices and systems; they will consider how one weds these practices with criteria for research, so that their work is purposeful, inquisitive, informed, methodical, and communicable. In training students to reflect critically on their own ways of working, the course presents a discursive, solution-oriented, performative, and multi-modal approach to practice.