Documenting process and decision-making: keep and select process images (sketches, tests, models, stages and failures) so the reader can trace the practice, experimentation and revision behind the work.

What this topic is asking

The Sustained Investigation is judged from images, and images of finished work alone cannot show the thinking behind it. Process documentation, the sketches, tests, plans, models, in-progress stages and failures you keep and photograph, is how a reader sees your practice, experimentation and revision. This page is about what to keep, what to submit, and when a detail image earns one of your scarce 15 slots.

Why documentation is evidence, not housekeeping

This reframes habits many students treat as throwaway. A messy test sheet, a part-finished piece, a model, a plan, a failed first attempt: each can be the clearest evidence that you investigated rather than simply produced. The student who throws these away each week is destroying their own evidence.

What to keep and photograph

Keep and photograph, dated, as you go:

• Sketches and plans that show an idea forming.
• Material and process tests (the controlled experiments from your investigation).
• In-progress stages of a piece, photographed before you change it.
• Failures, especially ones you later revised; the before-and-after is direct evidence of revision.
• Models, maquettes and diagrams (vital in 3-D, where a finished form hides its construction).

Photograph in good, even light at each stage, because you cannot recover a stage once you paint over it.

Detail images: a scarce resource

You may submit up to 15 Sustained Investigation images, and some may be detail images. A detail is a close-up of part of a work. It is powerful but costly, because it spends a slot that could show another piece.

Documenting decisions, not just stages

The strongest documentation does not only show what a piece looked like part-way through; it shows a decision being made. An experiment beside its result, a failure beside its revision, a test that changed the next piece: these let a reader infer your thinking. This is also the raw material for written evidence prompt 2, which asks you to describe how the work developed.

Why this matters

The whole Sustained Investigation score rests on whether the reader can see development, and the reader can only see what you photographed. Process documentation is the bridge between the making that happened over months and the 15 frames that represent it. Neglect it and even a genuinely investigative year reads as a folder of finished pictures.

Try this

Q1. Name three kinds of process work worth photographing for the Sustained Investigation. [Recall]

• Cue. Any three of: sketches and plans, material or process tests, in-progress stages, failed attempts, models or maquettes.

Q2. A student wants to use a detail image of a stitched seam in a textile work. State one question that decides whether it earns a slot. [Short explanation]

• Cue. Does the close-up show evidence (the stitching technique or a revision) that the whole-work image cannot? If yes, it earns the slot; if it only repeats what the full image shows, it does not.