Parallel session Studio-Based Learning

Paper 191

Reflecting the other; communication design students engaging with complex practice.
Neal Haslem
RMIT University

The design student becomes the client.
Brief – they write a little bit about themselves, their hopes, dreams, and no names. These get rotated and one of the other students has to create a gift for that person. At the end of the project they get to present the gift to the person they designed it for. Being the designer and the client. They reflect back on the experience, and capture what they learnt.
It helps that they design for a real person. They keep reflective journals, in which they need to describe the positive and the negative experiences. It creates an experiential experience of the effects. The projects usually run for 12 weeks.
The assessment includes the journal, as well as assessment of the reflection. Also involves a “client” grading. The idea is to see if the output changes. Is the shift temporary or complete?

Paper 78

Mapping the place and defining the space: exploring the interrelationships of context and program within a second year architecture design studio.
Dijana Alic
The University of New South Wales

Undertaken in the 2nd year of a 5 year architecture course.
Reworking briefs, so that they work in a non-static way. They become interchangeable, often to development, giving a real life feel. Once students have done research and found out how the project is going to work, they then have to rework the brief – going on to rediscovery.
Mapping here is a discovering of new worlds within the past and present ones.
All the steps of the project and going back are what create interesting solutions. The idea behind this exercise is the practice of the process.

Parallel session Multidisciplinary Design Education

Paper 323

Teaching Integrated Practice in a Cross-Disciplinary Curriculum After Two Years
James Doerfler
Kevin Dong
California Polytechnic State University

This paper takes a look at electives, and how to teach integrated practice in across disciplinary curriculum. They stated by looking at the core competencies of the course. If these were beyond the internal expertise and know how, they turned to external knowledge. They used alumni in industry to involve the students. They set up multi disciplinary teams, these worked together on projects, talked to each other on various levels. From this, they established various aims and outcomes. The problem they faced was getting everyone involved at the various times of the design, as well as assigning jobs and creating aims. They decided to get the students to start taking responsibility for their own learning. Students had to start find out what it was they need to know. The college arranged guest speakers and getting industry to come in and talk to the students. There second year became more defined and descriptive, and different students were exposed to each other’s technology. “How much is enough detail to know what is going on” – they found that this was very important for industry. Some of their projects needed approval, and at what stage they would need that. They worked with each other and pointed out what could and what could not happen within the project, this made it very real.
Not all the teams were successful. The students were made to reflect on their experience, like detailing, expectations. The lecturing staff also reflected, they found that they need to be careful of giving too much information in a short time.

Paper 325

The interdisciplinary Design Studio - Understanding Collaboration
James Doerfler
Kevin Dong
California Polytechnic State University

For the final year students, they got to understand collaboration, teaching critical thinking, real world situations. They received training in group dynamics and collaboration, by using competitions and team building exercises. Developed detail knowledge, “How to do that!” They learnt discussion and analysis as a team. Getting them out of their comfort zone. With “Core classes”.
The challenges faced included the assignment of credits, commitment time. Introducing various cultures to each other. Getting around the professional language. Working in holiday’s, and sometimes “dropping the ball”. The difficulties at managing such a big group. Accessing the various group as well as the individuals. However, the positives far outweighed the negatives and the project is one in which they are constantly learning, as academics as well as designers.
Finally, the feedback is interactive, and takes place after the deadline. All parties give a report as well as the group and so too do the lecturers.

Cloud Works

Plenary 2
Learning Design: Making Practice Explicit
Gráinne Conole
Education is not fully using the FREE recourses available to it.
Go have a look at www.cloudworks.ac.uk – join this group, some interesting discussions going on there. Might motivate us to start something like this, which gets used.
Go have a look at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/4001 for Gráinne’s full paper and slide presentation.

Parallel session Problem/project/studio-based learning

Paper 61
Crossing the Cultural Divide: A Contemporary Holistic Framework for Conceptualising Design Studio Education
Mahmoud Reza Saghafi,
Jill Franz
Philip Crowther
Queensland University of Technology
Improving of the learning environment. Education has grown, the environment in which it is being taught has not. The speaker refers to new settings for teaching. Comparing face to face with virtual training. Using Wiki’s and Facebook to promote communication between students and tutors.
The mode of communication must be dependent on the style of the lecturer, as well as the culture of the learners. How do they communicate? Work with what they are currently doing, and engage with students on their own turf.
Paper 247
Territorializing Pera: IMIAD – International Interior Architectural Design Studio Experience
Emine Gorgul
Tongji University
Ayla Atasoy
Istanbul Technical University
Collaboration of and in education. Teaching by using multi-cultural and inter-disciplinary programmes. Facilitating education through student exchange. Exposing students to various environments and various ways of thinking. The idea of exchanges would be to grasp diverse views and dismantle them, thereby exposing the students, and getting them to interact and make up their own minds. This would not only benefit the students but their lecturers as well, in terms of exposing them to various learning environments.
The above is done by means of a given project. Where the project facilitates and promotes the interaction between the different cultures. Not only working, but designing together, and in so doing understanding each other’s environment, and everyday activities.
Paper 418
The ‘Studio’ conundrum: Making sense of the Australian experience in Architectural Education
Louise Wallis
Tony Williams
Michael Ostwald
The University of Tasmania
The University of Newcastle
The studio means different things to different people. It is within this ‘studio’ space that learning occurs. This class space is made up of various facets, workspace, design unit, theory. However in reality are students exposed to how the studio actually works. You need to make the connection for them. How do you do that? What do they understand as a workspace? Student interaction and collaboration in the space is a very good way to do this. Inviting ‘real life’ projects into their space and seeing how they interact with them. Student motivation and support in this regard is very important. You need to look at the design approach structure, and how learning happens within that framework.

Body of the conference

The conference days were broken up into plenary session, with talks given by the keynote speakers and then there were three (3) parallel sessions a day. This is where the mere mortals of research  did their stuff. Each parallel session was divided into about seven (7) different categories depending on the day. Each session had three (3) speakers, who had 30min to say their say and take questions. This spread the meagre helping of delegates rather thin, and made deciding which session to attend very annoying, because you wanted to listen to everyone’s.
The parallel session topics ranged from workshops, design as research, multidisciplinary education in design, problem-based learning, design sustainable futures, learning creativity and design, e-learning, studio-based learning, to name but a few. So you can see the predicament on deciding which one to attend, they all sounded so good.
The buzzwords and exposed topics –
Multi-disciplinary moving to trans-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary
Problem/project/studio-based learning
Sustainability as a discipline and within design education
Collaboration and working with industry
Integrated practice
Understanding collaboration
What students use to communicate
Culture – understanding it
Working in teams
Student autonomy
Teaching critical thinking – VVVNB
Core classes – looking at core competencies
Interactive feedback
Mapping
Convergence and divergence – learning when to do which
Practice of process
Students must learn “how to learn” – interesting one!
Students must learn about quality
It is ok to learn by failure
Interaction design
Refining, recourse, evolving
Interacting within a community of practice
Sociological experience
Cultural
Social
Physiological
Ideological
= total experience
Experience for multi and trans-disciplinary
RESEARCH
Ethics
Electives
Andocentric visceral – human centred design – linked to environmental ethics

The first of the keynote speakers was Kees Dorst.

Kees is a Dutch design researcher and design “thinker.”  He is involved in research in Holland and Australia.  He just wrote a fantastic book with Bryan Lawson called Design Expertise, well worth a look. 

Although it would be a good idea to read his paper to understand his intent, I will try to put it briefly; the title is “DESIGN THINKING AT LARGE.”  He talks about design thinking gaining popularity outside of the core design professions.  That design thinking has become a buzzword in the business world.  He speaks of finding “design thinking” as an exciting new paradigm for dealing with problems in sectors as far afield as education, IT and medicine.  He goes on to say that examples of this is, through framing, integration, solution focus and the ability to create a context for forethought.  In his presentation, he proposed a framework that could serve as the backbone of a new, much more detailed articulation of design thinking for innovation.

Kees talks of multi-framed projects in terms of:               

What does design thinking bring – framing, integration, future focus, and forethought.

It connects design thinking to other ways of thinking.

“reframing” 

Students need to free up their way of thinking about design.  Educators need to be teaching design thinking.

To free up design thinking

                New rules

                New depth

                New scale

                New content

                Explore futures

Building the conference was held in

ConnectED 2010

Connect ED 2010

It’s a scary feeling to arrive at this huge campus, and try finding your way around.  I went on the Sunday to orientate myself, and spent time working in the library, the Australian’s are a friendly bunch, and eager to assist with whatever query you may have.  So I was allowed to sit in the student study era and work on my presentation.  Which by the way was full of students, strange, considering they were on holiday as well. 

My first day at the conference was meet with a lovely feeling of butterflies in the pit of my tummy, knowing what lay ahead, and of course, total excitement.  Having registered I watched as the delegates started slowly filtering in.  When it was time to begin, I was disappointed by the relatively small number of people in the hall. 

As the conference progressed most delegates commented on the low attendance.  We were told that due to the “world economic crisis,” the numbers had dwindled and colleges just didn’t have the funds to send people to international conferences at the moment.  I again realized how fortunate I was to have this opportunity to represent Inscape.  During one of the plenary sessions the chair informed us that 35 countries where represented at the conference, that defiantly made up for the lack of numbers.  (Plenary session or meeting, the part of a conference when all members of all parties are in attendance.)

I made contacts with people from all over the world, and I hope to correspond or collaborate with them in some way in the future.  When you get to chat to lecturers from colleges abroad, you realize that we all have more or less the same stuff going on in terms of classes, courses, and student issues.  As it turns out, it’s really nice to know that!

There are a lot of University’s and UoT in Sydney alone, and they were well represented.  They also all know each other and they collaborate with each other constantly as well.  I stated to get the sense that collaboration and cross pollination amongst, and between, education faculties and institutions has a very positive effect on the employees and seemed to hold benefits for their students as well.  I’ll elaborate more on this later.

To stress the above point, it’s interesting to note that three very different faculties in the same university hosted this conference.  Namely the Faculty of Built Environment, Faculty of Engineering and the College of Fine Arts.  This was not a coincidence, in discussions with various faculty members it became clear that they interact in a multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary approach to courses and subjects.  Again, more about this as I go along. 

The Connect ED conference came about out of a need to well, connect design education.  To speak the same language.  To learn from each other, and be inspired by each other

And in case you were thinking of immigrating.......

This delightful sandwich and glass of wine, R143.50!!!!?

It's all still there!