Stefano Converso Facoltà di Architettura, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italy 115
All the work is archived and it's managed through a database system. So all the stuff
being uploaded is archived, named and is available both in indexes and by keyword
search.
In parallel to the forum -where all the projects and the general reflections are
collected- the database also includes documents provided exclusively by the teachers.
In this section are included lessons and materials used during the projections, digital
drawings and pictures of the site, catalogues of examples, links and bibliographies
etc.
In every moment, in just one place, everybody has the possibility to get an image
of the all work done until that time. The dynamic website represents a real-time
"corpus" that allows the teachers to coordinate the production and check it during
the whole period of the lab and not only at its end. At the same time, students have
the possibility to look at the collective experience every time they could need it.
This limits the loss of material and experiences and at the same time it increases
the time for reflection on the projects. The student with his laptop can take beside
his digital design application a window with the course' portal, where he can in real
time publish his work. This builds up an intimacy without lack of privacy. One has
the possibility to look at the project in different moments, to update parts of it or
to publish ideas, waiting for the physical meeting in the lab. The forum becomes for
him a reference.
This is a crucial point: the "virtual" is not a substitute for the physical, it works
as an instrument and as an integration of it. In the web there is not a parallel world,
but a stable image of what happen in the real world. In the portal we archived for
example the faces of the students, taken inside the lab, that are connected to their
work with continuous new pictures added from the exterior spaces of the faculty of
from the rooms in students' houses. The space of telematic is tightly related to the
physical, and vice versa, with a continuous interplay of the two spaces.
In the end there is a very important aspect to underline. The continuous updat-
ing of the portal, due to the uploading of text and images, keeps fresh this kind of
website making it very similar to the use of e-mail, of newsgroups and of all the
recent dynamic systems such as "YouTube" or “My Space” for example.
The kind of technologies that we are using are now of course well diffused, and the
further research must now be directed into a more deep integration of design tech-
nology into the system. But we want always to take care of the basic aspect of the
system. It is important that everybody could act on it, and experiment it directly and
personally. This is a well recognized tendency on web 2.0 development, that finds its
main reference in the Google strategy and development of web-based applications.
In our case, the direct work and the continuous updating empowers the process of
identification, which is the most important aspect of every true community.
Notes
1 The CASPUR consortium is non-profit organization financed by MIUR (Ministero
dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e Ricerca – the Ministry for Education, Universities and
Research) and by associated Universities. More informations on: http://www.caspur.it