The nature of the client, architect, and contractor relationship has changed considerably within contemporary architectural practice. Today, clients place more trust in professionals who specialize in non-architectural areas, such as construction costs, rather than architects who specialize in design. While a client might hire both types of parties, this disproportionate placement of trust on one particular party could adversely affect relationship between the client and the architect as well as between the client and other essential specialists. These correlations between client, architect, and other professional key players, in professional practice, are not consistently reflected in architectural education. The relationship in professional practice can be improved by starting at the roots—exposing students to design-communication strategies, thereby preparing them to engage with clients on different levels. Inspired by recent academic curricula in business and design, this dissertation investigates the modern architectural education environment, its alignment with professional practice, and the related impact on learning spaces and curricula. By anticipating new architectural curricula that derive from the profession, current design processes and methods, when combined with client-driven communication concepts from business curricula, will expose students to a variety of architect-client interactions and relationships, will help develop stronger design-communication interaction, and will demand the occurrence of new educational spaces for these interactions. This doctoral project poses the following questions. How can students gain knowledge and confidence when communicating the value of design through client interaction within an academic environment? And, stemming from that, how can the learning spaces facilitate the integration of professional design and communication strategies? Evidence shows that a curriculum that brings interactions regarding client relations into the classroom reveal opportunities for re-envisioned design spaces that accommodate and adapt to new collaborative working models and that foster growth and collective creativity. Past research on business and design curricula, existing design strategies, and communication strategies led to the development of an integrated educational model known as co-design, which has been redefined to inform the design of a new collaborative educational space. This led to the creation of a new type of programmatic educational space, which brings co-design methods into the educational environment and directly supports student engagement with clients
