This chapter is about the exploration of approaches to practice-led research, with a particular focus on the field of interiors, yet with the view to determining affinities with other creative practices. Practice-led is used to describe the forms of knowledge generation utilised by designers, researchers and academics in the field, using the numerous ways in which research is undertaken when working directly with found materials: primarily existing buildings. It describes practice-led approaches that are gleaned from the numerous actions of handling materials and their subsequent documentation, analysis and reuse. These are described as performative practices, ones that designate the found as the site of mediation and the material for the generation of new insights. The underlying focus of the chapter concurs with Smith and Dean’s descriptions of practice-led research, (2009), as methods that are characterised as iterative and cyclical, and which foreground contingencies and the diminution of a preconceived framework of investigation. In this chapter I draw on the importance of site as the location of the material to be handled (Bolt 2019), and then explore practice-led approaches such as precedent, spolia and superuse in order to explain how they engender the various processes of their reuse. I use case studies to elucidate on these ideas. I have titled this chapter Inventories because practice-led research, using these processes, is a generative approach that involves the indexing and cataloguing of the found. As we shall see, this produces renewed insights, arising from the scrutiny and reordering of the extant.

This chapter is for practitioners in any field of creative work that utilises found or extant materials, creatives who use them in order to not only generate new insights, but also because it aligns more closely with the work they are undertaking. These are practices that prioritise what may be called thinking through making; approaches where theory may be applied subsequently to production. It is aimed at practitioners whom, like myself, arrived in academia after extensive practice experience. My experience of practice-led research is as a designer of interiors and as an educator whom recognises that less-traditional forms of research can be overlooked in relation to more established theoretical or empirically-based methods. Also, issues of secondary and primary research material are problematized and rendered ambiguous when using existing materials. Therefore, practice-led research in, for instance a university, and its justification, may be perceived as problematic within conventional definitions of research activities. This chapter aims to explore some of these concerns.