National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

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National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/70940

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Event Series

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College of Design

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 40

blog.folios : Social Networking to Academic and Professional Engagement

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-03) Buchanan, Suzanne ; Lambeth, C. Thomas

Today's eighteen-year-old college freshman belong to a generation known variously as Generation Y, the Millennial Generation, the Computer Generation and the Internet Generation. Not only is this group the first to have grown up with digital technology as an integrated part of their lives, remarkably, most can not remember a time without computers. As such, members of this generation arrive on college campuses with a different way of seeing and experiencing the world, not to mention new ways of communicating and developing social relationships. Design educators have the opportunity to embrace technological advances, thereby, focusing in on the strengths of this generation of students. Using online tools, e.g. blogs, that students are already proficient with to enhance their academic and professional engagement is the focus of this paper. During the fall of 2007, authors Buchanan and Lambeth required fifty-five first year interior architecture students develop a "blog.folio" to document their work during their first semester of study, with the intention that students would continue to maintain the blog throughout their nine semesters in the program, thus creating an ongoing record of their work and the accompanying dialog with instructors, peers and other visitors to their sites. This paper documents the opportunities, challenges and mixed-reviews raised by this experiment.
(de)Coding the Studio Method to Teach the Design of Human-Computer Interaction

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-03) Brandt, Carol ; Cennano, Kathy ; Douglas, Sarah ; McGrath, Margarita ; Reimer, Yolanda ; Vernon, Mitzi

This paper reports on the beginning of a three-year project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to apply the studio method to teach computer science students principles of user interface design. The grant spans three universities and four disciplines, with a research team of faculty drawn from computer science, education, architecture and industrial design. The goal of this project is to leverage knowledge about design education from architecture and industrial design to develop new educational models and materials for the design of software-intensive systems, specifically in the area of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Computer Science is, in many ways, a design discipline. For example, application areas such as graphics and visual programming, artificial intelligence, information systems, and human computer interaction, require the design of algorithms, interfaces, interactions, programs, specifications, simulations, and/or systems. A few innovative computer science programs have implemented the studio method. In these cases the logistics and procedures involved have been well documented, but little is known about which components of the studio experience are critical to successful outcomes. Thus, our aim is to determine through qualitative research an elemental set of interactions that contribute to studio learning. Further, we will identify effective ways of applying these lessons to teaching design in human computer interaction. In this paper, we review the nature of design, the use of the studio method in teaching, both in schools of design and the wider university, and relate our initial discussions on transferring the studio to computer science. The nature of a "hybrid studio" in HCI is demonstrated through describing a course that we are currently examining to gather baseline data for our research. We conclude with a set of questions to take back to architectural design education.
Details and Fragments: Studio Process and Products

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-03) Wallick, Karl

Architecture is not exactly whole. We remember instances, elements, and details. Rarely are the experiences and sensations in architectural experience comprehensive. The context of what we do as architects is always fragmentary even as it seeks to be resolved comprehensively. Rather than insisting on the totality of complete works, architecture could be better understood as an infinite matrix of detailed moments. These details can be disassembled from their constituent buildings and reconstructed as a universe of scale-less moments to be understood over a lifetime of observation, use, thinking, drawing, and construction. The purpose of this paper is to track the generative role of architectural fragments in tectonic discourse through the pedagogy of an early undergraduate architecture studio course. The Section Fragment studio uses sequential sectional division as a means of managing architectural detail development. This undergraduate studio is an attempt at structuring a studio exercise in the manner of Gregotti's techne. It desires to join the practical with the poetic through the development of tectonic architectural strategies, an understanding of the practical forces at work on and within architecture, and an awareness of modes of design within current practice. A lens of fragmentary focus is not dissimilar from the habits of contemporary practices with large task-specific teams and fast-track construction schedules. However, the opportunities for productive investigation within the tectonic fragment remain unexploited within the academy. In addition to comparing the types of knowledge generated by the fragment, we must ask: how does this knowledge compare to the tectonic questions pursued in practice? Furthermore, what are the qualities sought through this piecework method and do tectonic sensibilities provide sufficient linkage between various fragments at multiple scales? The studio examples will show that as a teaching tool, fragmentary tactics can be as useful as comprehensive tactics in addressing the multiple forces within an architectural project.
New Nomadism, Nothing is True

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-03) Riether, Gernot

We live in a world that has been digitized, and it is now about finding means to intensify our perception of this world in order to navigate through it. Suggesting a strategy to expand our cognitive framework I will explore how media can operate as an interface that couples information with cognitive processes.
From Urban Experiences to Architectural Narratives

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-03) Trova, Vaso

Cities are a densely coded context for narratives of discovery and the recovery of experience. They have a capacity to act as condensers of information and to integrate assimilations of behaviours, people, styles, typologies, forms, ideas. Cities are comprehended through spatial practices. Movement in the city is a major practice which enables us to accumulate and organize urban experiences. It creates spatial narratives containing memories and views, specific places, objects, beginnings and ends, distances, shadows, buildings or parts of them, encounters, signs and panoramas. Urban space becomes intelligible through sequences of movement. Its complexity, mystery, splendour, rhythm, are revealed and interrelated through the route of the urban dweller. Similarly to urban space, architectural space is perceived in terms of sequences and spatial practises. According to Jean Nouvel "To erect a building is to predict and seek effects of contrasts and linkage through which one passes...in the continuous sequence that a building is...the architect works with cuts and edits, framings and openings...screens, planes legible from obligatory points of passage". This parallel is being used as the underlying idea for introducing first year students to Architectural studies at the Dept. of Architecture, University of Thessaly. The didactic approach takes for granted that students are accustomed, although rather unconsciously, to navigate into the urban context and to understand its multi-layered and multi-informational structure. Therefore it tries to draw gains from previous experiences undervalued or though to be completely irrelevant to students expectations. The idea of spatial narrative as structured by the student becomes the spine line for realizing that architecture is a complex structure, it exists in the dimension of time and movement, it becomes important not as an object of art but during a process of inhabitation and that it has the power to shape human practises.
Digital RE Thinking: Digital Literacy in Beginning Design

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-03) Hemsath, Timothy

A challenge to CAAD pedagogy is how to use digital tools and the digital environment to explore design thinking and process that makes inspiring beautiful architecture to educate a new breed of "Digital Master Builders"? At the beginning design level how can educators subvert the digital tools available to develop a strong design foundation supporting the generalist core? In the rigor to develop BIM for professional practice focusing on technical information, how can the power of such a tool be co-opted to develop fundamental problem solving design-thinking skills? The methodology this paper will discuss is a process for digital thinking in beginning design. First, I will look at this process to describe a digital design thinking exercise exploring the morphology of industrial designed products by beginning architectural design students. The book by Kieran Timberlake, Refabricating Architecture is a model that has inspired a re-thinking architectural practice. The digitally enabled design process that has enabled the authors' methodology can also be co-opted for a digital thinking methodology for beginning design. The second case study investigates a digital collaborative project titled "shared city" completed by Third year students who engaged the digital design process to create and fabricate a collective block wall using emerging technology. The morphology and "shared city" projects go beyond technical CAAD competency to introduce Digital Literacy, which recognizes that this new digital world "calls for a new set of assumptions and a fundamental reorientation in thinking" , a digital discipline "mastering ideas, not keystrokes".
From CFY to DFN: Artifact > Category > Building

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-03) Ziada, Hazem

The author's move from a 'Firstyear' program (advocating a cross-disciplinary approach) to a 'Foundations of Architecture' program (pedagogically bound by the promise to deliver 'comprehensive' architectural design within a five-year professional degree) forces questions of the disciplinarity of architecture to the foreground. This paper pursues this probe into (inter)disciplinarity by focusing on its outcomes: its design artifacts - rather than on its processes and knowledge-base. The move is conceived as a leap into a framework of design-instruction which appreciates the conceptual coherence of one artifact category. The 'building', as central to mainstream architectural practice, becomes the object of questioning; do buildings "exist"? And if so, should they? Tracking the evolution of design-studio exercises and projects (and others) which migrated with the author between programs, the argument demonstrates attempts to explore and question the singularity of the building category. Moreover, the paper draws on the author's concurrent doctoral-research into the peculiarity of the 'building' in light of early Soviet architecture, and which casts the 'building' as an artifact with exceptional sensitivity towards orchestrating social exchange (co-presence). The outcome of such attempts is a working conception of the 'building' as indeed possessed of singularity but in an open-ended way. It poses 'building' as an unpredictable assemblage of 'events' rather than as an entity bounded by spatial or socio-economic confines. It underlines the 'building's' exclusivity, while not precluding that its components may evolve into dynamic hybrids with other artifacts.
[Ab] Sense - Revisiting the One That Can Not Get Away From Oneself

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-03) Charest, Robert Michel ; Tucci, Jacob

Meaning in design work can potentially be implied, attached or altogether disregarded. A condition which may indicate that meaning, even in the loosest of semiotic arguments, amounts to mere arbitrariness. In order to discuss meaning, in a philosophical manner, two concessions must be made. The first, is that design can be interpreted as aesthetic work--potentially as art. The second, is that the work itself can be the vehicle for a sense. The paper will focus primarily on revisiting recent graduate work on signification and significance in product design. The work unfolded between 2002 and 2006 at two Universities and was centered around the "de-specialization of objects". The project oriented theses were basically an inquiry into the fundamentals of the human-object relationship and grounded into philosophical hermeneutics, semiotics as well as post-structuralism. The theses "attacked" the foundation of "type" by underlining the fundamental differences between "multi-functional" and "de-specialized". They also challenged the demiurgic process of generating "de-specialized" objects by stressing the hermeneutical certainty that one cannot get away from oneself. The ontological value of significance is not on trial in this paper; nor are we claiming to reveal overlooked connections between abstract signifiers and their signified. It is the elastic quality of human participation with an that is examined here. The time/place at which an object can engender complacency or stimulate intrigue is what interests us.
Charrette : A High Performance Vehicle for Learning in the Design Studio

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-03) Charest, Robert Michel ; Lucas, Patrick Lee

When announced at the beginning of a studio session, a charrette often elicits groans from students and some pondering about the tasks that may lie ahead in the short period of intense work articulated in the parameters of the design exercise. When bundled together, a series of charrettes serves well students in providing space for them to articulate visions for their work in various levels of design studio. In beginning studio classes, the charrette teaches as much about process as product and permits students to learn about the values and some of the tribulations of collective enterprise. Over the last several years, the authors have experimented collaboratively and independently to punctuate their design studios with charrettes, bringing this historic practice to the design studio of the present. In doing so, the authors have illuminated a path to more holistic design approaches with resultant stronger work. Through this paper, the authors examine the fundamental place of charrettes within design discourse and advocate for this essential endeavor in both education and practice.
Once Upon A Shape, or A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-03) Martin, Cecile L.K.

This paper discusses the use of a design project to advance the beginning design students' ability to visually communicate complex themes, emotions, and content through the creation of a narrative in a simple book form. This project stresses how content may be determined through the manipulation of form.