The impact of teaching models, group structures and assessment modes on cooperative learning in the student design studio

As a result of ever diminishing teaching resources, an increasing number of architectural educators are setting group design projects, rather then spreading their time thinly over a large number of individual projects. This allows them to co-ordinate longer and more in-depth review sessions on a smaller number of assignment submissions. However, while the group
model may offer an authentic learning model by reflecting design in practice, the approach is not without its obvious shortcomings as a teaching archetype for the assessment of the knowledge and skill competencies of individual students. Hence, what is clear is the need for a readily adoptable andragogy for the teaching and assessment of group design projects.
The following paper describes the background, methodology and findings of a Strategic Teaching and Learning Grant funded research project carried out in the year 2005 at the School of Architecture and Building at Deakin University. The project aimed to inform a change of classroom/studio practice governing the assemblage, teaching and assessment of student design teams. The development through these changes of cooperative and student centred learning principles focused on effective design collaboration and fair assessment should, it will be argued, lead to an enhanced group-learning experience in studio, which will subsequently and ultimately enhance professional practice.

Architect as composer: engaging architecture students with music in the design studio

This paper explores the engagement of architectural students with music in a second year design studio, through a Game and two design projects. A ‘Game’, in the context of this research, is a low-risk learning activity derived from the model established in the CUTSD ‘Reflective Making’ project. The Game required students to complete one of three tasks; to compose and record a piece of electronic music; to research the works of a composer within a digital presentation or to design a prototype musical instrument. This was used as a generative device to inform the design of a Music Room: a space for the contemplation and composition of music. A third stage of the project involved the actual construction of 8 Music Rooms, a high-risk, high-reward activity that requires physical resolution of an established relationship between music and architecture.

This paper will focus on the engagement of architecture students with the Game and related design projects. Student perceptions of the project are used to inform an evaluation of the project as an authentic learning experience and as a valuable component of their architectural education.

Media use in the design studio: a case study of second year architecture

This paper outlines a case study of media use within a second year design studio at Deakin University in Victoria. Australia. The case study involves an active cohort of students working on four design projects, each staged to address specific aspects of tectonics and conceptual design. The research is based on three questionnaires, a focus group discussion and analysis of assessment and digital folios to explore the way students use digital, analogue and hybrid media within their design projects. Relationships arc drawn between media use within projects and student perceptions of the benefits of using particular media within projects of a conceptual or tectonic nature.

Operating a studio within a research culture: the urban heart surgery design research forum

The question of whether or not design can be considered research has perplexed schools of architecture ever since they were first introduced into universities. It was at the center of the Oxbridge union debates in the early 1900s. It formed one of the corner stones of the Oxford conference on education organized by the RIBA in 1958 (Martin 1958) and came under scrutiny again in the UK with the introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 1992. While the arguments both for and against are considerable1, “in order to understand the questions and the possibilities of architectural research and to respond to the difficulties that confront us now, we have to have a model which acknowledges what schools of architecture really are, and could be, and then work with that” 2.
Drawing on professionally oriented research models, such as qualitative ‘clinical research’, from Medicine and the Health Sciences - where the processes of exploration, observation, investigation, recording and communication are conducted in-situ by the ‘practitioner-as-researcher’ 3 - the following paper outlines an initiative introduced in 1999, referred to as the ‘Urban Heart Surgery’ 4. The program actively integrates students entering their second degree program into a studio based design research culture and allows them to engage in critical discourse by working on high profile strategic design projects in three areas significant to Victoria’s future growth: Metropolitan Urbanism, Urbanism on the Periphery, and Regional Urbanism.
With a growing core of industrial and community based partnerships, including: four regional councils (Bendigo, Ballarat, Geelong and Warrnambool) and three metropolitan municipalities (Melbourne City, Port Phillip and Wyndham), the forum actively facilitates a graduate/practice research agenda through the ARC linkage grant program.

Cross-discipline collaboration and innovation in the design studio : drawing on the Bath model

As information expands and comprehension becomes more complex, so the need increases to develop focused areas of knowledge and skill acquisition. However, as the number of specialty areas increases so the languages that define each separate knowledge base become increasingly remote. Hence, concepts and viewpoints that were once considered part of a whole become detached. This phenomenon is typical of the development of tertiary education, especially within professional oriented courses, where disciplines and sub-disciplines have grown further apart and the ability to communicate has become increasingly fragmented.
One individual and visionary who was well acquainted with the shortcomings of the piecemeal development between the disciplines was Professor Sir Edmond Happold, the leader of the prestigious group known as Structures 3 at Ove Arup and Partners, who were responsible for making happen some of the landmark buildings of their time, including Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre, and the founding professor of the Bath school of Architecture and Civil Engineering in 1975. While still having a profound respect for the knowledge bases of the different professions within the building and construction industry, Professor Happold was also well aware of the extraordinary synergies in design and innovation which could come about when the disciplines of Architecture and Civil Engineering were brought together at the outset of the design process.
This paper discusses the rational behind Professor Happold’s cross-discipline model of education and reflects on the method, execution and pedagogical worth of the joint studio-based projects which formed a core aspect of the third year program at the School of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the Bath University.

The design studio: fabricating a sense of architecture in drawing

The purpose of this paper is to provide a platform for investigating the relationship between the student and the tutor via the design drawing and in particular the idea that what gives grounds for architecture to embody something is what is imagined is expressed in the design drawing. It is suggested that in architectural education the sense of architecture's fabricated properties find their apparent expression from the convergence of the tutor and student toward these drawings. In an act of perceptual contortion, there is an endeavour to reconcile what they see with what they think the drawing might suggest. Part of this mental reconstruction is based on the expectation that something is in the drawing to see. The drawing is produced based on the supposition that it will be read, generating a particular conditioning of the student's attitude toward the relevance of the drawing. It is engaged as the receptacle of ideas about what architecture is. The result is that sometimes the emphasis on the drawing as something to be consumed implies a permeation of the supposed sensory qualities of architecture imagined by the student designer, the portrayal of which is indubitably a product of the medium. While this might be commonly experienced in studios, it is proposed that this may be perpetuated in architectural education not merely by the act of drawing itself and what the drawing is, but how the student/tutor exchange contributes to the consciousness of what is portrayed.

Cecil street studio: improvised community and sustainable practices

It is a little after 7.00pm on a Sunday evening and people are still arriving, slightly hurried as they kick off their shoes before entering the studio. They pay $7.00 and find a seat facing the bare studio floor; white floor against the pink walls. The room seems crowded, although the numbers are not large, and people talk comfortably sitting on the few benches and chairs or on the floor. One of the performers emerges from her conversation amongst the audience to front the group and the babble drops away. “How many of you are new to Conundrum?’ she asks. A few people raise their hands, but many do not. The question is a litmus test for the state of the audience and as a way to bring the novice into the game. “Everything performed here tonight will be completely improvised” she continues. “And tonight on Conundrum we have…” and she rattles off a list of the names of the groups or solo performers who will be performing that evening. Some of the names or groups are different from the last Conundrum one month previously. But two of the groups, State of Flux and 5 Square Metres, have been performing at Conundrum, on the last Sunday of every month, for the last eight years.

Studio - learning and teaching environment for multimedia

This paper is a case study of the introduction of a studio environment for the teaching of multimedia practice. This change is in the context of multimedia being placed within an information technology degree program, where the conventions and traditions of computer science prevail. The studio based teaching was accepted and now new studios are being built at the university and a research project is proposed with the Queensland University of Technology to explore further teaching and learning issues using studio
teaching methods.

Studio enquiry and new frontiers of research

Given the growing complexity of human existence, there is a need for new ways of representing ideas and of illuminating the world and domains of knowledge. A growing recognition of the limits of traditional ways of representing the world has given rise to a search for alternative approaches to transform and represent the contents of consciousness or what can be known of lived experience. Researchers are recognising that scientific inquiry is just one type of research and that ‘research is not merely a species of social science’ (Eisner 1997: 261). Dissatisfaction with positivism and behaviourism as reductive modes of knowing has also come from within the science disciplines themselves. In his work entitled, The Discontinuous Universe, (1972) Werner Heisenberg states that the knowledge of science is applicable only to limited realms of experience and the scientific method is but a single method for understanding the world. Moreover, the notion of scientifically-based knowledge as statements of ultimate truth contains an inner contradiction since ‘the employment of this procedure changes and transforms its object’ (Heisenberg 1972: 189). The work of Heisenberg and others including: Lincoln and Denzin (2003), Schwandt, (2001) and Schon (1983) reveals that knowledge is relational and that different models of inquiry will yield different forms of knowledge.

Simulating autonomous robot teams with Microsoft robotics studio

This paper presents an application of Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS) in which a team of six four wheel drive, ground based robots explore and map simulated terrain. The user has the ability to modify the terrain and assign destination objectives to the team while the simulation is running. The terrain is initially generated using a gray scale image, in which the intensity of each pixel in the image gives an altitude datum. The robots start with no knowledge of their surroundings, and map the terrain as they attempt to reach user-defined target objectives. The mapping process simulates the use of common sensory hardware to determine datum points, including provision for field of view, detection range, and measurement accuracy. If traversal of a mapped area is indicated by the users’ targeting commands, path planning heuristics developed for MSRS by the author in earlier work are used to determine an efficient series of waypoints to reach the objective. Mutability of terrain is also explored- the user is able to modify the terrain without stopping the simulation. This forces the robots to adapt to changing environmental conditions, and permits analysis of the robustness of mapping algorithms used when faced with a changing world.

Simulation of underwater robots using MS Robot Studio©

One stage in designing the control for underwater robot swarms is to confirm the control algorithms via simulation. To perform the simulation Microsoftpsilas Robotic Studiocopy was chosen. The problem with this simulator and others like it is that it is set up for land-based robots only. This paper explores one possible way to get around this limitation. This solution cannot only work for underwater vehicles but aerial vehicles as well.