How to Start a Collaborative Research Conversation
Strengthening connections between academic and professional practice in landscape architecture has long been a priority for LAF, particularly with respect to research. LAF envisions a discipline in which knowledge created in academia increasingly responds to the needs of real-world landscape architecture practice, and where professional practice is supported by a substantial and growing evidence base emerging from academic research.
Increasingly, professional and academic practitioners are pursuing direct research together to combine their skills and approaches and pursue shared topics of interest. When a collaboration is successful, the resulting insights, knowledge, or innovation can be transformative — as is the experience of collaborating across the perceived boundaries between the academy and practice.
But working together is not always easy. Professional and academic practitioners face widely varying norms and expectations, terminology, motivations, and resource realities that can cause disconnects and significant challenges to collaboration. For example in academia, rigor and generalizability take precedence, whereas in professional practice, pragmatism and actionable insights are the priority.
Direct conversations among academics and professionals can help set the stage for effective research partnerships. Based on LAF's observations and experience facilitating collaboration through our Case Study Investigation program and LAF Research Grant in Honor of Deb Mitchell, we've developed a guide to begin those discussions.
This guide is intended to be used in the early stages of a potential partnership. LAF offers it as a resource for our prospective research program participants as well as the wider discipline of landscape architecture to facilitate honest, direct conversations that lay the groundwork for productive and successful research collaborations between academic and professional practitioners.
