ABSTRACT
The open project and its brief are inextricable from the table and studio itself—its culture, structure, and content. In considering the open project, the blank is the space between the terms in a dyad, and it is this absence that generates narrative constellations. The essential incompleteness of the open work and the organizing capacity of the blank provide the foundation for the text-reader relationship. The brief, if crafted clearly and succinctly, has the capacity to open the project—structuring an investigation and prompting a creative and iterative design process that results in a wide range of provisional design solutions. It is the project brief that initiates the study by setting out and defining the focus of the students' investigation in the form of an active field. What is lost when teaching becomes replaced with training is the active role of the student in interpreting and questioning the project, conducting their own investigation and making their own discoveries.
