Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

222 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy

Introduction

A selected design exercice uses the experiment for presenting colaborative methods
of teaching architectural design at the Faculty of Architecture of Wroclaw University
of Technology.
The main objective of this exercise was to show students the complexity of colabo-
rative design: how to organize it, how to be creative in colaborative process of design
and how to comunnicate to accelerate process of design.
Specialists in colaborative design define it as: ”to work toether with a shared goal’
(T. Kvan). Folowing Maver and Petric, “ In collaborative design, the participants are
not strictly bound to solve assigned partial problems (like it is in cooperetive design),
but are encouraged to engagge in solving design problems from other participants as
well or to contribute to their design work”.
Collaborative design is described as process “...of stimulating each other to con-
tribute to the design task. Participants act towards mutual understanding and maxi-
mizing outcomes that satisfy not only their respectivegoals, but also those of other
participants” (H.H. Achten).
Specific stages and components of collaborative design process can be descibed
as follows:

• organizing of the group, the group integration


• problem identification, formulating ideas and ideology


• establshing common communication environment and methods of presentation
  i.e. language, methods of reporting the process, CAD programs, tools etc.


• formulating rules of stimulating and finding conseunsus


• decomposition of design problem into smaller tasks, schedule


• implementation of the process: finding solutions – students acting their prof-
  fesional role in multidicyplinary team


• presentation and promotion project


• recapitulation, evalution, improvments and conclusions.

Using different forms of communication participants have to develop their own work-
ing environment on solving design problem: design software, documents storage, data
exchange platform, forms of process records and reviews etc.
As part of curriculum of MSc in Architecture, second year course of architectural
design has been taught using methods of collaborative design. The course is obliga-
tory for all students of the Architecture and Town Planning specialisation. Its study
load is 60 hours and the students receive a credit of 8 study points.
Regulary the course consists of two design tasks related to “the complexity of multi-
disciplinary design process and compexity of collaborating in different context”(Jos
van Leeuwen,Frans van Gassel, Ad den Otter). For this presentation one of them was
selected: “Fastfood reality – home”.
Generally speaking the course consists of several characteristics of colalaborative
design, i.e.:

• teams working on design,


• all students can manipulate the design,


• there is estabished communication environment supporting the process of design
  and enabling sharing information.