How to organize design studios eligible for multidisciplinary: a case study of clustered design studios

Eindhoven University focuses on multidisciplinary design incorporating four major disciplines: Architecture, Technology, Management, and Urbanism. Learning how to design is a key ingredient in all and is taught in studios (12-15 students supervised by 1 tutor). With over twenty studios and tutors it has always been problematic to reach uniformity in approaches. A new model of organizing studios is developed since 2001. Still groups of 12-15 students, but now four groups are clustered in a special way. A cluster is housed in a large classroom, where anyone (of 50-60 students) is able to seek feedback from each one of the four tutors. So there is always a tutor with a discipline close to a student’s individual interest. Clustering studios also facilitates mutual observations and discussions of weak students. All students are individually marked by four tutors resulting in a more objective evaluation. Further uniformity within studios is improved by interchange of tutors in time

Preparing students towards the complexity of today's practice : start-up in a multidisciplinary assignment

Education in the Department of the Built Environment (of TU/e) aims to prepare students for multidisciplinary design teams. The Bachelor program offers a broad range incorporating essentials of urbanism, architecture, structure, building physics, real estate, construction, services et cetera. This broad BSc program lays a foundation for students and is followed by a Master program that focuses on specialization. There are six specializations: Architecture, Urban Design & Planning, Structural Design, Building Physics & Services, Real Estate Management & Development and Construction Management & Engineering. Multidisciplinary in the BSc is more than offering a variety of knowledge in courses and lectures. The Department also puts a lot of effort to train students to gain experiences in integral design teams. This takes shape in studios but is best expressed in the Multi-project (a semester assignment in the last year of the Bachelor). This assignment is organized by 9 coaches (from all specializations in the Master). The assessment is always a practice-based issue, and students have to cooperate as a design team during one semester. Developing the Multi-project has been a long route that took place over many years with several adjustments according to experiences and information gathered by student inquiries. This paper gives a very global overview of the present setup to contextualize this assignment. After that, the main part of this paper focuses on the kickoff (first 2-3 weeks). Here students start in parallel studios, meant to put them on track for integral design. Each studio combines two disciplines and compels students to precede design by analyzing all kind of issues in the light of the specific assignment. Because of the complexity of this assignment we frequently ask students to fill in an enquiry. Because of this we are now able to draw conclusions from major changes during the last 10-14 assignments (2007 – 2013)

Phenomenological Approach to Product Design Pedagogy: A Study on Students’ Experiences in Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Settings

Product design pedagogical approaches require a specific mix of competences that demand multiplicity of perspectives, hybrid knowledge that exceeds professional field silos, and continuous problem reformulations. To do this, design studio education follows many traditions, among which is design critique. Design critique is believed to provide students with the ability to reframe design problems, but it can also lead to misunderstandings. The necessity of this approach is put into question by assessing the experiences of a group of students in an intensive course structured for interdisciplinary work, intercultural teams, and projects based on challenges from practice, where the critique was not part of the pedagogical program. The course was conducted over four consecutive weeks and supported a hands-on approach based on an interdisciplinary work between the areas of product design and occupational therapy, with the participation of Brazilian and Norwegian bachelor students and professors. Students responded to questionnaires prior to and at the end of the course that addressed their expectations of and experiences in the course. A qualitative analysis of the students’ responses was carried out based on content analysis. The joint work with occupational therapy students and professionals, as well as the opportunity to develop projects that targeted demands from people with disabilities, were shown to be factors that contributed to students’ engagement in the course and overall gain of knowledge. The experiences reported here indicate that the phenomenological approach to the design studio, which focuses on providing an immersive environment, deserves more attention from educators, and that design critique is not necessarily a crucial ingredient in design education

Various challenging students assignments : cases of creations realized on festivals and events

A most effective way of learning is to intrinsically motivate students by challenging concrete tasks; this paper describes a number of cases (11 in total) in which students were challenged to design, elaborate technical and practical features, and actually built, too. All cases have a similar approach: the initial development of a concept is an individual assignment for all students (to generate as much ideas as possible), then the most promising concept is selected (often part of a competition) and continued with technical and practical elaboration by a group of students. This group becomes in most cases a wider group when the actual realization takes place.A valuable source of challenging assignments can be found in contributions to festivals and events. Festivals offer ample opportunities, because most of the festivals are developing activities in addition to their core business of "music and food". Contributions to festival are preferred because it really doesn’t require much to inspire and motivate students for this kind of assignments. The demand for a distinctive structure, that stand out in a festival is motivating in itself, the intention to actually realize the project helps a lot, too. There is also an additional opportunity, offered by the limited duration of a festival (1-5 days). This provides a great scope for experiments and innovations. Combined with the challenge to develop an integral object within technical and pragmatic constraints provides a good basis for attractive education to students.<br/

The significance of sketches in the education of architects and in the development of their professional skills

Sketches are an irreplaceable method of recording thoughts and of correcting the design process. They are a means of discovering and examining reality which supports the development of imagination. Sketching is an essential element in the education of architects and in the double-loop learning process. Sketching opens two channels of communication: conversation and spatial-visual activity. Both traditional and new digital tools have important roles in the development of future architects. The primacy of computer design over freehand drawing in an architect’s work can lead to the disappearance of a designer’s individuality and creativity, limiting the role of his personality at the earliest stage of the design process

Question asking in design reviews: how does inquiry facilitate the learning interaction?

Design reviews are common educational practice in design disciplines, where students meet with instructors and other stakeholders to discuss the progress of a project they are engaged in. Such reviews are tightly coupled with project-based learning approaches in the design studio. A number of research studies have looked into various characteristics of instructor-student interactions during design reviews. In this study, we investigated the question-asking behavior of instructors, students and clients. We paid particular attention to high-level questions that relate to causal and generative reasoning. We analyzed 22 reviews involving six undergraduate industrial designers, who undertook design projects individually. We observed that the instructors and clients were not effective in modeling question asking behavior for the students during the reviews. We also observed that the structure of the reviews did not facilitate the desired behavior either. Consequently, we present a theoretical framework that proposes a more explicit structure for design reviews, deliberately addressing particular aspects of the design process. Ultimately, we suggest that instructors should be inquisitive about the students’ design approach, and that the students should take responsibility for reflectively articulating their design thinking and actions during design reviews

Collaboration and Design Education Through the Interconnected HIS: Immature vs. Mature CI Loops Observed Through Ethnography by Telepresence

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Student and Lecturer perceptions of the one-to-one tutorial in undergraduate Fine Art

Historically, the individual tutorial has been seen as an opportunity to focus on the student and the student’s particular needs. The aim of this study was to discover more about both student and staff perceptions of the one-to-one within an undergraduate Fine Art course. Ten online tutorials were observed over a five-month period and twenty follow-up interviews undertaken with students and lecturers, using a structured set of questions. There was broad agreement that good communication and dialogue were at the root of a successful experience, with students particularly valuing the strength of their relationship to their tutor. In addition, the opportunity to talk to a practicing artist could have a validating effect on the student and help to bring them into the community of Fine Art practice. This supports existing research which has stressed the importance of empowerment and legitimation in the process of forming an identity as an artist

Three studio critiquing cultures: Fun follows function or function follows fun?

For the longest time, design was an activity with no distinction among disciplines. Over time, separate design disciplines had formed their own cultures and their own educational practices. In this paper, we use data from a limited set of design reviews along with a literature survey to conduct a comparative analysis of contemporary reviewing and critiquing cultures in architecture, industrial design and mechanical engineering. We point out differences and communalities, and conclude with a list of the lessons the three disciplines can learn from one another regarding reviewing in the classroom. We dwell especially on one issue that currently differentiates the three cultures: the stress they lay on excitement and fun. We believe that a world in which products of all sorts – from buildings through machines to consumer products – are fun, is a better world to live in