Architecture as a design and creative practice is a form of intelligence. From that point, the architecture project (and design from the broadest sense of the concept) has the potential to become a vehicle for critical thinking capable to materialize itself into research or, as it is here questioned and proposed, through the inquiry in order to give value to disciplinary singularities above those scientific paradigms classically accepted in the academia. The design and creative disciplines are found with profound and unresolved tensions facing traditional and too lineal research methods, excessively predictable and immoderately organized to capture the complexity of the inquiry processes arising in the center of the architecture production and design; all of them characterized by unstable ambiguous and multidimensional knowledge in essence, (Smith & Dean, 2009). Some certainties, however, enable the distinction of at least two-antagonistic and complementary-edges that outline a certain place a la map of La Caza del Snark (The Hunt of the Snark), from the poem by Lewis Carroll, to define what the inquiry does in these disciplines: on one hand lo que deberia ser (Simon, 1996) as opposed to a eso que es (Sabrovsky, 2010); and on the other hand, the notion of the new rhetoric, which is subjective and interpretative and typical from humanities (Buchanan, 2001). From there and through two research-creation projects (SSHRC, 2075) that explore the possible relations, design could have with the emergence of political dissents through the inquiry over the role technologies (technical devices, the city and citizenships) may have in such relations., three design reflections are proposed: the project as dissent device, recovery of subjectivity and the recomposition of the academic practices in design.
