This chapter explores the social significance of uncertainty and its role in design education. It suggests that uncertainty has the potential to tie students’ critical thinking with knowledge production in university and in practice by exposing the ways in which design methods and processes are devised, institutionalized, and incrementally developed through time. The chapter focuses on a design studio I have taught for which uncertainty was taken as a conceptual foundation. The main ideas it brings up are the significance of making methods explicit in the late stages of design studies, the intertwining of project and subject, and the knowledge and experience this produces. The theoretical framework developed is based on an exchange between the concept of uncertainty within design studio pedagogy and concepts drawn from the work of Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin.

The inventory is presented as a research-by-design and pedagogical approach whose process and form engage with the street as a multitude while highlighting its complexity and significance for urban public space. By bringing together exhaustive observation and recording of urban phenomena with their representation in ways that resonate with the subject and are propositional, the inventory is defined as a situated exploratory practice of documentation and representation that manifests itself as a practice of design. To do an inventory of the street is both to draw the register of what is and to project its future possibilities, what could be. This is exemplified through a series of student projects responding to an exercise given by the authors. Through direct and indirect observations, questions about processes and methods, their inventories develop new ways of looking and understanding the city and its streets as well as novel considerations that call for action and reimagining. The inventory underlines the agency of documentation and representation with respect to the built environment beyond preconceived notions of design and disciplinary boundaries.