The New School, New York City and Paris

The New School is based in New York City and includes Parsons School of Design, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, the College of Performing Arts, The New School for Social Research, and Parsons Paris. The university also describes 34 academic centres and institutes that cross disciplinary boundaries. This structure brings design, creative practice, social theory, politics, economics, performance, media, and urban questions into one research environment.

Design research needs objects, spaces, interfaces, images, materials, users, or making processes. Liberal arts and social research need texts, institutions, communities, markets, histories, and public decisions. Performing arts need bodies, sounds, scripts, stages, audiences, or production records. A project should identify the school, centre, studio, archive, or research group that owns the main method.

The New School's academic centres allow projects to connect design with social, environmental, economic, and political questions. Parsons research labs address fashion, making, digital experience, and creative methods, while the social research school supports work in economics, politics, sociology, psychology, and history. New York and Paris provide distinct settings for housing, migration, culture, public space, media, work, and design, but the project should state which city supplies the evidence.

A study may work with a neighbourhood, community organisation, archive, performance venue, design studio, public agency, or digital platform. It may also be based on a material experiment, visual analysis, interview series, or theoretical archive. Define the object, participants, site, time period, and practical or intellectual result before adding a global comparison.

Follow the object through the college, school, centre, lab, studio, archive, and researcher. Design needs materials, products, interfaces, images, bodies, spaces, or users. Social research needs interviews, surveys, institutions, policy documents, markets, or communities. Performing arts need scripts, performances, recordings, audiences, or rehearsal processes. Economics and politics need data, organisations, decisions, or historical records. The humanities need texts, objects, languages, and cultural collections.

At The New School, classify the work as design-led, practice-based, archival, textual, computational, ethnographic, organisational, or policy research. Name the studio, gallery, stage, school, archive, company, neighbourhood, public body, or dataset that provides the material. New York or Paris may be the field setting, while a lab or archive may be the analytical base. Explain that role, identify the first object, interview, drawing, performance, record, model, or observation; keep the project anchored in one school. Add the intended audience, city boundary, or collection period so the creative or social result can be interpreted clearly.

A workable New School question connects a design, cultural, social, or urban process to a defined result. It might study a public space, build an interactive object, analyse migration, examine a performance, model a housing issue, interpret an archive, or evaluate a community design. Name the school, centre, evidence, and opening method. Set the city, participant group, artefact, archive, or time period before adding a second international setting. State the audience, the form of the output, and the observation rule that will guide interpretation. Keep New York and Paris as distinct settings unless the comparison is part of the method today.