Trace
Follow the changes back link by link, on evidence only; stop where the evidence runs out, not where the story would.
One wool thread tracked from fleece to finished cloth.
Seen in Forensic Architecture, 77sqm_9:26min, documenta 14, 2017
Try it on your work
Follow one existing line through your situation with your finger, your feet, or a pen (an edge, a route, a seam) and record it without improving it, all the way to where the line ends. What it passed through is the finding.
Take a statement your project depends on and trace it backwards, speaker by speaker, to where it entered: who said it to whom, and before that. The origin and the dead end are both answers.
Pick one input to your project and follow it forward through every hand, tool, and transformation it passes until it exits. Draw or list the chain, and mark the link you'd never seen.
How it has been used
Follow the thing backwards or forwards through time: where the stain came from, where the path wears, what the document looked like three versions ago. The move forbids inventing the history: you may only work with evidence the transformation actually left.
Where it leads
Grouped under Show me what I’m missing