110 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
edge is the true essence of the web, and in that sense the software system that we
use for the design labs is both a witness and a player of the open source culture. In
that sense, the keyword for all our work is networking, that means a personal use of
Internet, nor passive neither cold.
Every student is at the same time user and editor of the portal: he owns and
updates directly a forum about his project^4. In the forum he's completely autonomous
and he can upload pictures, animations or vectorial materials (dwg, pdf and so on)
that are visible and open to comments and upload of similar contributions by every-
body. The teachers collaborate to the forum by adding pictures, scanned sketches of
by modifying files previously uploaded. In our experience, this continuous updating
is a strong source of inspiration for new contributions by everybody in the lab.
Fig. 3
Two examples of the course' webportal articles with pictures taken to stu-
dents. The article includes a link to launch the forum on the project.Of course managing the online aspect of the class and making every student par-
ticipate is not easy. It implies, moreover in the first days of the website existence,
a continuous check of what is happening online, and the continuous direct publish-
ing of examples, ideas, sketches, to make the networking increase.^5 This approach
usually gives anxiety to the teachers involved into the research program: they are
scared to “lose time” on the net. But this attitude seems to be much more natural
to the students. They have at present made unuseful the old computer room of the
faculty, because they all own a laptop where they are always connected, practicing
continuously instant messaging and peer-to-peer activity. What is interesting in
their attitude for our context is the relation with the tendency arisen in the web
under the definition of “life sharing”^6 : ”Life Sharing is a real-time digital self-por-
trait. Started in the year 2000 and active uninterruptedly until 2003, Life Sharing is
0100101110101101.ORG's personal computer turned into a real time sharing system.
Any visitor has free and unlimited access to all contents: texts, images, software, 01's
private mail. One can get lost in this huge data maze. Based on Linux, Life Sharing is
a brand new concept of net architecture turning a website into a sheer personal media
for complete digital transparency. Permanent infotainment pioneering the peer to peer
mass diffusion. Privacy is stupid”.
Going beyond the extreme experience of this definition proposed by the two artists,
and according to the theory expressed by De Kerchove, we basically just asked the
students to “externalize” electronically their work and their reflections on the class'