Tag: design teaching

The Four Syndromes: How not to choose your design studio at architecture school

The Four Syndromes: How not to choose your design studio at architecture school

Peter Raisbeck

Yes, it is almost that time of year (at least in the Southern Hemisphere) when architecture students begin class and go about the business of choosing a design studio. This short blog is specifically aimed at that curious class of human beings known as architecture students.  I think in some ways it would be better if the studio leaders interviewed and then selected the students rather than the other way around. I am told that this is the case at some school’s of architecture and I think it avoids the popularity contests that seems to characterise the studio teaching systems in many architecture schools.

The four worst reasons for choosing to be in a design studio are related to a cluster of syndromes: “running with the pack” syndrome, “charisma” syndrome,  “interesting project” syndrome and worst of all the “sounds easy” syndrome.

Running with the pack syndrome. 

Popularity is the most misleading reason to choose a studio on. Don’t succumb to  peer group pressure or groupthink. All because a potential studio seems popular amongst your friends that doesn’t in any way guarantee that the studio will be right for you. A studio which is popular at the beginning of semester may or may not achieve good outcomes at the end of semester. Besides who really wants to be in a studio full of your friends? It might make you feel safe and warm and fuzzy but the studio, its tutors, the project and the skills you will learn may not match your own educational needs as an aspiring architect. Being in a studio with your friends doesn’t really foster what I like call design resilience.

Its great to get into a popular studio and “run with the pack with your friends” at the beginning for the semester. It is not so great at the end of the semester when you realise how unsuited that studio was for you. It’s even worse when the studio outcomes of the most popular studio at the beginning of the semester end up being the most mediocre at the end of semester.All because it is popular doesn’t mean the studio will be good.

Charisma sydnrome

Charismatic architects do not necessarily make good studio leaders or teachers. Of course they looked great at the studio presentation, they have been published a lot, won a few awards and have a great website. But, that charismatic architect or the person who gives a great presentation to students about the studio may in fact be one of those woefully inadequate studio teachers. Woeful studio teachers are the ones that are potentially narcissistic, lack the humility needed to teach, mismanage your criticism time, develop favorites in the class and give contrary and contradictory advice to students from week to week. The seemingly charismatic tutor or architect may not be the tutor that you need to foster and build your design confidence.

Interesting project syndrome. 

This is when students choose because it seems like an interesting project. It might be a museum in a far flung and exotic corner of the world, it might seem like a real project with real life clients, it might seem funky because part of the project is to use the robots to fabricate one of those domey things; worse still, it seems interesting because you have always wanted to design a pop-up barista coffee cart.

What architectural or studio project isn’t potentially interesting? Good architects are the people who  make mundane and ordinary programs and problems into something cogent and culturally powerful. So just choosing a studio because it sounds like an interesting project is a really unthinking way to chose.  I learnt the most from the worst and least interesting projects that I did at architecture school. The bourgeois house, the outer suburban primary school, the kindergarten the social housing on the large site. You don’t need an exotic landscape, location or intricate program to learn in a studio.

Of course, its not so great when you get into the “interesting project” studio and find there is no established brief and you spend so many weeks researching the project that you don’t get enough time to design it at the end.

Sounds easy syndrome 

The sounds easy syndrome is usually the choice where the design studio student feels they don’t have to work that hard. The brief is established, the typological complexity of the building is something the student has done before, they know the tutor and they know they are not a hard arse. The student knows other students who have previously taken the studio and they all know that it is not terribly challenging. You can easily tick the box.

Unfortunately, it is easy for students to think they are learning something when they are having a great time in a design studio. In fact the converse is probably true. When the student is challenged by a tutor or a design problem that is probably when they are actually learning something. By doing studios that are personally challenging an aspiring architect is able to learn resilience, not just in the face of critical indifference or negative criticism, but also learn how to pursue a design proposal from start finish with all the various steps and missteps that this normally involves.

After all, once outside of architecture school, the aspiring architect must rely on their own reserves in the face of trenchant indifference to architecture.

Diversity 

A great post graduate, or Masters level, architecture school will present to its students a range of studios. The portfolio of the studios offered in the school should be diverse. It should not be centred around any particular fashion or ideological cause. A range of contexts, projects as well as a range of design teaching styles should be presented to students. Thats pretty much what is on offer each semester at the architecture school where I work at MSD. A school which is only devoted to parametric studios, or is aligned with the particular outlook of the school’s professors I think is a very conservative school. It goes without saying that diversity in both teaching staff and projects on offer is extremely important (I still know of architecture schools where the  design tutors each semester are predominantly male).

Choosing a studio for  a postgraduate architecture student is a personal one. In choosing a studio students should firstly ask themselves the following questions. The primary aim of these questions is to help you figure out what your learning objectives are.

  1. What technical skills do I have and what skills do I still need? Which studio or studio leader help me develop those skills.
  2. What am I yet to do at architecture school? What projects or types or scales of problem should I get experience in?
  3. What do I need to learn about in relation to design processes. Do I have the confidence to experiment? Should I do a studio that allows me to do this and is right outside of my comfort zone?
  4. What do I need to learn or in what kind of studio do I need to be in to grow in confidence as an aspiring architect?

Of course all these questions, or variants thereof, should also be asked by practicing architects with their own studios as well. If as a student you can answer these questions you are half way there. All you need to do then is find out as much as you can about the studios on offer that you think best match your learning objectives. That may mean asking around regarding the tutors teaching abilities and design expertise, and maybe, just maybe, actually talking to the tutors running the studio and asking them questions. If you can it is also good to see what was produced by the studio leaders in their studios in previous semesters.

You cannot rely on Architecture school to learn what you need to learn. Learning and then becoming an architect is kind of like any race in many respects. Preparation is important, practicing on different types of tracks, constantly refining your own training regime and above all taking responsibility for your own education is vital. The global trends that have led to the academicisation and privatisation of architecture education now leaves a lot to be desired. The best architects in the future will always be those architects who are self taught.

 

 

 

 

Managing Creative Teams: 5 lessons from the architectural design studio

Managing Creative Teams: 5 lessons from the architectural design studio

Peter Raisbeck

Architectural design studios exist in a highly complex industry sector with multiple stakeholders and numerous financial pressures. Architects must both educate and guide their clients through a highly complex and risky process. For the most part the property and construction industry is one of the most brutal industries that a firm can compete in. This is primarily because most property development and work in the sector is driven by the economics of price competition. Apart from architects, and perhaps interior designers, few other actors in the industry really care about design and design outcomes. Certainly not in the same way, or the same extent, that architects do. As a result the design studio, the team which creates the theories concepts and ideas driving a project, needs to be effectively nurtured and fostered. This team needs to be led in a way that fosters its capabilities to generate ideas but also to ensure that those ideas are robust. It’s no good leading a team in a way that prevents it from producing ideas or generating ideas that are easily diminished as soon as the cost cutters and value managers turn up.

 1. Be Diverse

Of course it goes without saying that gender and ethnic diversity is essential in any creative team. I like teams where everyone is different. Good leadership should be able to harness the difference’s between team members rather than turning difference into conflict. Clone teams are boring for those who work in them and I think clone like teams only ever aspire to mediocre results. Celebrating, fostering and supporting difference, enables a team to produce design knowledge that has the ability to produce a range of options. It also enables a team to critique a design from a multitude of perspectives.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest mistakes architecture students make is to form into groups and teams with their friends. They all live in the same area, or come form the same town or have the same skills. They don’t often realise that once they are in the real world they will work in teams full of strangers and people with diverse expertise and even age groups. One year I tried to change this and I selected the groups in my subject. I got the architects together with the landscape architects in order to do the assessment tasks. The idea was to try and simulate the kind of disciplinary exchanges that take place. The result was high degrees of conflict against me and within the groups. The architecture students resented not being with their friends. The next year I set up a whole lot of group formation exercises in order to facilitate students forming groups with complementary skills. There was less conflict and I thought it was working until I realised, despite my efforts, they had all got into their same old groups with their peer groups. After that I gave up and now my students self select their groups. The problem is that students then dot stay in these groups for the duration of the course poorly performing groups always perform poorly and better groups always do better.

My colleagues at the Parlour web site have written a lot about gender, diversity and equity and it is certainly worth looking at their site. Notions of diversity can of course make a difference to the outcome. A building I am familiar with ended up being mediocre, rather than great, because the culture of the office and the project team that produced it did not actively pursue diverse thinking.

The team itself needs to be diverse. Recruiting clones is fine if you want everyone to agree with you or produce nuances of the same idea. Worse still is a team where everyone has the same skill set or the same way of thinking. Diversity means having people in a team with different skills and ways of perceiving. In architectural teams, or any creative team for that matter, it is really important to have people who can thing in 3 Dimensions; who can think spatially.

2. Form a team culture 

The first 5 minutes of a team meeting are the most important. This is when the culture of the creative team is formed. In these crucial minutes do the team leaders suggest that the culture is collaborative? Do they espouse the highest conceptual and design aspirations for the project? Do they suggest that people in the team can make mistakes and take risks without recrimination? Do they suggest it is important for the team to have a sense of its won identity? Is difference and diversity in the team acknowledged and accepted? Will  contributions be acknowledged and praised? Or is it one of those teams where the slightest  misstep leads to censure and underlying and unspoken criticism.

3. Foster and tolerate ambiguity

The design process is highly ambigous. Often there are no right answers to a given scenario or problem. I think we have all heard or read about wicked problems. For architects, the design outcome is not exactly or precisely prescribed or understood at the beginning of the process. Nor can the design process be described as a logical sequence of precise actions (architectural thought is different to engineering). Moreover, sometimes the team, or some members of the team, might generate or pursue options that seem bizarre or unrealistic. All of the factors tend to mean that their is a high degree of ambiguity in the design decision making process.

It is the role of the team leader to know when to hold open and tolerate the ambiguity and risks of the generative design process and when to conclude various lines of flight. In other words there are times when ambiguity needs to be tolerated in order to pursue new lines of thought or ideas, that do not accord with a prevailing line, that just might be worthwhile. These ideas may not seem immediately instrumental or pragmatic. But they need to be pursued and their possibilities held open as strategic options or design options. A good design leader or architect will lead his team in a way that ensures there is a range of  different options being pursued and considered at any one moment in time. This should be done in a way that is systematic and considered. In contrast, the not so great design leader, creative  or architect will suddenly have a new idea out of the blue and make everyone change the design, or bits of the design, at a whim and usually at an inopportune time.

4. Increase the feedback speed 

Ever wondered what those thousands of interns do at the star architect firms. Well they often produce options and lots of them for any given scheme. I remember seeing thousands of options for the CCTV building in Shanghai at a OMA exhibition in Berlin. For those interested, Optioneering processes have been written about by my colleague Dr. Dominik Holzer and at CIFE at Stanford 

Option generation and then feedback in a team needs to be frank, honest and open. It needs to be delivered without conflict. Teams members need to understand there is no such thing as a dumb question; another common mistake of architecture students is to be afraid to ask dumb questions.  Communication needs to take place in an environment that is supportive. Team members should not feel that there are no wrong answers or a sense of criticism or censure.

Things will of course, and inevitably, do go wrong. the more open the channels of communication within the team the quicker ideas can be generated and problems solved as these ideas are defined. Open communication will also ensure that the connections and linkages needed between each step in the workflow are seamless rather than dysfunctional.

The quicker feedback can be incorporated into the design process and the greater the ability of the team to reiterate processes and provide recursive solutions the more robust the team is. Again one of the great mistakes architecture students make is to produce a design that has never gone through any iterations or its elements have never been explored in a recursive way.

5. Excellence in team leadership is critical

Team leadership is critical in the above mix. Studio leaders and the leaders of creative teams need to support difference, tolerate ambiguity, foster continuous feedback, build a team culture and do things quickly. Strong creative teams well led will produce great ideas. The best teams produce ideas that are well integrated with and closely matched to their project circumstances. As a result, great designs or campaigns are resilient to the travails and sniping of cost cutting, project risks and the mindless search for profits over the value of design.

All of the above are attributes arise out of and are taught in the best architectural design studios. To produce great graduates these attributes must be allowed to flourish in architecture schools.  In the university system, an emphasis on rigid policies and processes over fostering studio culture – or any kind of culture for that matter – loading up staff student ratios and cost cutting has eroded this culture.  I worry that the proponents who dream of a new higher education system, based around technology and virtual reality, are eroding what really counts because it cheaper or faster or better. At the moment I think that what really counts can only be taught face to face and that the architectural studio can teach us a lot about managing high performance in creative teams across many disciplines.

What architecture students should try and do over the festive season.

What architecture students should try and do over the festive season.

Peter Raisbeck

Architecture school won’t teach you architecture 

Don’t rely entirely on architecture school to teach you architecture. If you do you won’t learn enough to be an architect. A good architecture school is only an introduction to architecture. It should teach you a few different ways to design and give you an insight into architecture’s political, technological, cultural and historical dimensions. It’s up to you to be responsible for your own architectural education and educate yourself as an architect.

I came to this view as an architecture student in the dark ages of the 1970s and 1980s I spent very little time looking at a computer screen. At that time I  went to an architecture school that went through a lot of changes in the way that it taught its student’s architecture. When I began architecture the do-it-yourself hippies reigned supreme and by the time I graduated 10 years later the highly mannered post-modernist architects, with a regionalist bent, had the school in their grip. This instability in the school’s curricula (and staffing) meant that I could not rely on the architecture school itself to teach me everything I needed to know. It was certainly not like today’s factory like, and pedigreed, architecture schools with stable curricula and a tick the boxes approach to completing subjects. As a result, I took it upon myself to learn architecture.  As a result and to a large degree I was self taught. The festive season and holidays, depending what hemisphere you live in, is a good time to teach yourself a few things about architecture.

Get out of the computer

To live under the impression that you can learn all there is to know about architecture from a screen is a curious delusion. Ensconced in the computer some architects, and architecture students, never really leave it. The work needed to develop the lines of a computer model or simulation is intense. But all too often the 3D lines aggregated into form and then given a sense of volume take on a life and a power of their own. It is all too easy seduced by the bright lines and images on the screen. Its all too easy to privilege your own viewpoint as you use the computer.

However, architects intervene in the real world. They translate data, information and knowledge between the material world and the virtual and back again. For this reason it is extremely important  to study and observe the architectural phenomena of the so-called real world: Buildings, doors, windows, gutters, trees, spaces and the grain of different materials.  Be mindful in the way you observe these things. The purpose of this is to build up for yourself a knowledge of form and space and the relationship between things. It’s a good idea to develop a curiosity about details and try and figure out how things are made. How does a glazed window frame work? Where do the down pipes take the water? What kind of pattern is on the brick wall? What is happening in the timber grain.

Use a sketchbook

Corbusier did it. He used a sketchbook almost everyday of his life to observe and record things of interest. To included very bring and in it life, art and architecture merged. Now of course, Corbusier was the ultimate alpha male colonialist architect who would have probably worked for anyone if he had a chance. Nonetheless, his sketchbooks are full of his travels, his early sketch books show his journeys through the Orient. Greece, Rome, Venice, Istanbul and what the romantics and Beux-Arts architects called the grand tour. Many of these sketches informed his urban polemics about the modernist city. His sketches of Algerian woman became the contour lines in his paintings, plans, sections  and perspectival sketches. Of course, this has raised questions about the way he thought of women and his relationship to them.

His sketches of India include landscapes of the Himalayas drawn from the air, animals, Indian monuments and all the symbols of India’s religions. A kind of Instagram of the sub-continent. All of these sketches moments moments and sketched contributed to Corbusier’s design process. The icons and symbols that he collected through his sketches, as recorded in his sketchbook, were often re-used or  run up in his projects for the Capitol at Chandigarh. The scheme for the unbuilt Governors Palace is a good example of this. But none of the sketches made by Corbusier are in any way conventional, or academically correct, in the way they are drawn. They are messy, they are quick they re in pencil, sometimes they are coloured in. A few of them show an incredible poignancy for example the sketches of his wife’s hand the night that she passed away.

A sketchbook if kept diligently is a collection of material images and moments that can be drawn upon and used later in the design process. A sketchbook like those of the Italian architect Aldo Rossi merge life with memory and art.

Read a book

Recently in my friend’s studio the students were asked to read a book. It was like pulling teeth because architecture students hate reading. The book had words and sentences in it that if read would help the students design an important part of the community building they we asked to design for the semester. Towards the end of semester there were still a few people who did not read the book and as a result they did not do so well.

But, the great thing about being an architect is you don’t have to read that much. Nor do you have to read in English all that well. You only have to look at the plans and sections and all the other images and diagrams that describe buildings.  When I did my PhD in architectural history much of the material was written in French and sometimes German or Japanese. Most of the schemes I was studying were unbuilt and only existed as fragments in architectural magazines or in various libraries. But as an architect I was able to reconstruct what I was looking at by “reading” the plans of the utopian schemes I was studying. I did not have to read much of the text. My analysis and recovery of these schemes from the archive rested on my ability to reconstruct them in my mind as if they were real.

Go on a road trip

Get your friends and go on an architecture tour or road trip. I learnt so much doing this. Visit some buildings and try and figure out what you think of them. Are they what you imagined them to be? Are they well designed? Is their siting appropriate? Did the architect deserve the award or accolades the project was given? How does the real project differ from the way it was represented on the internet?

Can you tell from the completed project how it was designed? By this I mean is it evident if a project has been designed by a committee or has gone through a number of different, or too few iterations, in the design process. Can you tell from the physical reality if a project has been designed in particular software packages.

Make something (with your hands)

This is a really good idea. I don’t just mean attend the latest robot workshop or do some fancy stuff with the Architecture school’s 3D printer or laser cutter. Those things are good to do but I also mean that it is good to actually make something with your hands, a collage a physical model, or even a tree house. A bit of furniture. Use some tools. I was fond of making collaged comics with photocopies and sticky tape.

Sketching, reading, making, and even the architectural pilgrimage all help to bridge the gap between how something is in our minds and its constructed reality. Learning how to imagine spatial phenomena in your mind is a central element of architectural education. I fear that the computer all too often destroys this type of thinking. It is a type of thinking that seems to link memory and emotion with spatial imagination. It is a kind of thinking that is critical if architects are to create the cities of the future.

 

6 Ways to Generate Research Knowledge in an Architectural Practice.

Peter Raisbeck

designideaslabs_4

Recently I bumped into a friend who is a director in an small architectural practice he told me that R&D was the practices highest priority. Many architects say this and numerous architectural websites and brochures are full of statements about how research is valued and prioritised. My friends firm is different. They have an advisory board, are involved in numerous architecture schools, one of the directors appears to be constantly gathering new knowledge across the broad domains of urbanism, design and innovation. Interestingly, the practice is one that is actively involved in seeking funding and commercialising at least one of its ideas. The firm is a good example of a firm that is able to do research and then push that down the pathways of innovation and commercialisation. A number of international architects, Australian architects and even academics have been able to go down this path. But I fear this is the exception and that many architectural firms are not effective or face numerous barriers (lack of time being the principal one) in the way that the approach the research and development question.

My point here is not to question what research is, or how it might be strictly defined, or how architectural or design research contributes to knowledge. That is the subject of another blog (if not a PhD thesis). But my friend got me thinking about the question of how should architectural firms, particularly small ones, organise themselves in order to do research?

1. Have a research strategy.

Research involves developing knowledge or expertise in a particular area. For the reason it makes sense that an architectural practice would focus their research efforts in a way that aligns with their business strategy. If the firm seeks to develop a competitive advantage in health, or facade design, or sustainable design or some aspect of urban design then its research efforts should align with this.

Whilst it is important, it may not be effective to pursue research that is simply about implementing new technologies in the office or figuring out what the next bit of funky software the firm should buy (see no. 2 below). Sometimes the line between these activities and strategic research is blurred. One office I worked for, in the earlier days of CAD, did spend a lot of time researching and understanding the expressive possibilities of CAD design and architectural representation. As CAD developed this gave them a large competitive advantage. Clearly the knowledge and research gained, as CAD systems themselves developed, had strategic benefit to the firm. In any case, I would always push for a line of research in the office that is at least aligned with the its current strategies or with its intention to develop new areas of expertise.

2. Pursue radical innovation rather than incidental research.

Whilst research efforts in an office should create knowledge which adds to the firms competitive advantage. This should not always be the case. Of course, I am not sure that simply being technically proficient or doing research that improves a firm’s current efficiencies and capabilities.It is a balancing act between conducting research to improve current capabilities versus working on seemingly new and radical innovations. Getting the balance right is important but sometimes research needs to be wacky. Research is about trial and error and indeed about making mistakes. That is in part what research is about. Buckminster Fuller is a pretty good example of this.

But research in a architecture should not simply be seen as simply materials research. Research is not simply about finding out about new materials for your latest job and then filing the information into a folder for later reference. Unless, of course you think that the knowledge you gain from the material research process can be used elsewhere. But, I think that is what all architects think: They all think the extra research or knowledge they gain on one project can be used on another. But I am a little skeptical about this. Especially, if the firm does not have a research strategy or its projects are highly customised and different each time.

Sometimes you really have to undertake research that is risky or may not have an obvious or immediate benefit.

3. Create networks that help you to gain knowledge.

As my friend has done in his practice Architectural firms who prioritise research build an ecosystem of mentors, advisers and experts that they can interact with to debate and test new ideas. Almost all startup companies will  have advisory boards that advise them through the pitfalls and hazards of commercialising an idea and then growing. So why not architects.Networking of course isn’t neccessarily always  about trying to find new jobs. It can also be about gaining knowledge of what is going on across the domains of knowledge where you practice. At least one person in any practice needs scan the horizon for new ideas or the latest research developments.

A good example of creating a research network is Google. The Google platform is an ecosystem that includes consumers, software innovators, content providers and advertisers. It is a permeable system where outsiders can also become collaborators. Hence, it is not simply a matter of trucking in people or experts to help you solve a problem. It is about creating an network or ecosystem of collaborators who can help a firm to create new knowledge and to also understand what is happening within architectural and urban discourse. 

4. Use your staff to create research knowledge.

Another dilemma for architects is how to organise a firm to do research. In the old days all wisdom in the office came from the Master. The so-called Master was not unlike Gary Cooper in the Fountainhead movie. He (sadly, always a he) was usually the architectural designer who by force of ego, class background, cachet of education, or through experience and perseverance. When I worked for  a “Master” in the 1980s as a young architecture student I could do nothing right and you can imagine what this did for my confidence as a designer. He was a good architect and in later years proved to be a designer of international note. But, he was also never wrong and always insistently right. Contending with the Master’s wisdom was really not a great career move. It was a little bit like being in a cult. Master’s love acolytes and they of course like acolytes who agree with them. The worst thing a firm can do is to create team’s in its own image rather than diverse teams which I would argue are they key to creativity.

Hence, it is best to strive to create distributed research knowledge within and across the firm. More research is done in a practice where everyone contributes to it. Although, we may not want to emulate Google, it is still a good example to think about in this respect. Of course architectural firms aren’t as large as Google; nor are they filled with Ivy League software engineers who get time off each work to do research. But allowing and organising your staff to do research has a number of intangible benefits. Firstly, it gives employees a reason for being and staying in the firm in between mindless CAD “monkey” work. It obviously helps a firm build a portfolio of research interests and streams that may or may not develop, and thirdly by using your staff or other team members you can quickly increase the firms knowledge base. Directors, managers and team leaders in firms need to cut employees slack to do the research and create the new ideas. Ownership of new conceptual ideas or design processes more often than not is, and should be, shared. It never really resides in the mind of one person no matter how much symbolic capital they may have as a master. As they say at Pixar: “A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organisational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.”

This might be why my favourite model of Knowledge Management or  is based on the Japanese management theoretician Nonaka whose work points the importance of  “knowledge as a vital source of competitive advantage, there is little understanding of how organisations actually create and manage knowledge dynamically.” Nonaka and his colleagues understand that knowledge creation in an architectural firm, or any firm for that matter, is a collaborative and iterative process. 

5. Collaborate with academics.

Bring academics into your firm’s research ecosystem.The problem is academics are often time poor and hemmed in by teaching commitments and an overly regulated bureaucracy. On the other hand not all academics understand the dynamics of practice or business protocols. Most academics in architecture schools love to do research. They also like to talk about it. Because of this it is a good idea to contact and foster the participation of academic researchers (like me!) into a practice’s work. Invite them in as critics. Invite them to the firm’s christmas party. Allow them to participate in planning workshops or esquisses. This will help the academics understand the pressures and time frames of the practice. It will also get them thinking about what you do as a firm and what you can do better. Before you know it you will become part of some usefull collaborative research projects.

6. Teach a studio.

One good way to conduct research and create new knowledge is to teach a studio at an architecture school. I don’t think this is simply a matter of choosing a project with a site and a brief and then getting the students to do it. Studios should not be seen as teaching the students to simply solve specific and simplistic design problems. This is too much of a crank the handle approach to design studio teaching. I believe all studios, particular at a post graduate level should involve the so called “wicked problems”. Research knowledge generated from the studio should be more speculative and less technical. It should aim to solve a difficult problem or be focused on a project that exists in a problematic context.

I would suggest that integrated studios are better. By this I mean studios that integrate different domains of knowledge or disciplines such as landscape architecture, planning or urban design. Or they may integrate different theoretical or cultural domains of knowledge for example the studio may be focused on a particular stakeholder group or sub-culture.

For research in a studio context to be effective it must also have a political dimension. Why? Because, new design knowledge generated from a studio should ideally question an existing situation or status quo. But not everyone would agree with this. Running a studio with an overly technical focus, for example a studio focused on the students exploring the limits and expressive capabilities of a particular software package, may not necessarily be contributing new design knowledge to the architectural domain. In setting up a political dimension or element to a studio the knowledge created can then help the studio leaders to position and locate themselves in relation to various political or policy debates as they emerge in urban discourse. This enables a firm that teaches to gain an advantage over its competitors by actively being a part of an ongoing public and policy debate. A firm may then be able to anticipate and participate in the projects that these policy debates engender and spin off.

3 Questions about MOOCs and the Architecture Studio.

Peter Raisbeck

As a long standing studio teacher I don’t want to be replaced by The Massive Open Online Courses or MOOC. The MOOC has rapidly become a new mode of online teaching in higher education. For myself, as an architect and an architectural educator, the MOOC raises three questions: Firstly, how might the MOOC impact on architectural education in general? Secondly, will the MOOC reinforce or erode the production of architectural knowledge via design research? Thirdly, will MOOC’s threaten the architectural studio as the central component of architectural education?

MOOCs have now been devised across every domain of knowledge including fields as diverse as Bioinformatics, Interactive Computer Graphics, Teaching, Programming and Coding, Animal Behaviour and Welfare and even the Beatles. MOOCs are seen as a way to democratise higher education and bring new knowledge to students who would not normally have an elite education. Since 2012 when one of the main MOOCs provider’s Coursera launched there has been phenomenal growth in the MOOC market. There are now countless MOOC platforms, providers and courses across the globe.

As the first wave of MOOC’s were being developed neoliberal university executives started to panic and MOOCs  suddenly became the thing to foster. This because this group saw the MOOC as the next disruptive technology. It was argued that MOOCs would disrupt the Higher Education sector by being an alternative service delivery model to traditional university teaching. Some pronouncements were ominous: An Ernst and Young Report entitled University of the Future published in 2012 predicted that universities “would not survive the next ten or fifteen years” unless they adapted to MOOCs.

Is the MOOC, as well as other types of virtual studios, too easily seen as a glib substitute for face to face studio teaching? We considered this when I put in an application at my university to develop a possible MOOC around architectural design. We presented our work at the Bartlett research symposia in 2013. In thinking about how to develop an architectural design MOOC the obvious difference to studio is the disparity between in size. A traditional studio is a small team of creative individuals and the MOOCs has ten’s of thousands of students. The difficulty of translating the studio to this global format may be why there are only currently a very few architectural design studios delivered by MOOCs. Many of the current MOOC offerings related to architecture focus the history of architecture rather than studio teaching.

In 2013 The ‘Developing Cities’ course developed by the Leuphana Digital School, led by the American architect Daniel Libeskind,  offered a design  based on a  group design competition.  Students worked in teams of 5. The MOOC employed  video lecture keynotes, online forums, a messaging system which enabled virtual classroom discussions. Feedback was provided to the students across a range of categories such as: architecture, economics, social science, cultural history, sustainability, infrastructure and public health. The winning team produced a design for a  port city in Paranagua Brasil.  The final proposal described a Masterplan which was described mostly by text but simplistic photoshopped images and sketches.

I would certainly be interested to hear of more examples of architecture related MOOCs.

I don’t like to see the domain of architectural design diminished as a field of knowledge and practice; in the same way that I don’t like my design students to bury themselves in computers. I tend to agree Michael Jemtrud of McGill who states that architectural education should not be an “impoverished simulacrum for the profession.” He argues that for students design studios are about developing a critical position and understanding different design methodologies. For me the most important element of studio teaching in a architectural school is teaching the “continuous cycle of critical reflection.” A “tick the boxes” approach to a architectural teaching doesn’t really cut it for me. A syllabus in architectural design teaching is worthless unless experimentation and critical reflection is built into the studio. As David Salomon of Cornell, notes that the design as research studio through “experimental process of making and testing risky propositions with recursive trials and errors, that has the potential to move architectural thought and action beyond the dual mythologies of objective reason and individual genius.” I am not sure MOOCs can do this at the moment.

In this context it is useful to compare the MOOC to a Virtual World like the online game Minecraft. The MOOC is also a game world. Like Minecraft it is immersive, individualised and digitally delivered. Minecraft encourages the formation of social networks and has over 40 million users world wide. It is a global game, perhaps a step up from the MOOC, a territory for students of architecture to build in. Minecraft, like the MOOC, is inherently multi-scalar, user friendly and there are substantial resources online to facilitate new users. Most importantly, it fosters sociality the key element that has been observed as missing from many MOOCS. Minecraft is well suited to group collaboration and collectivism for design. As a  component in a MOOC It would allow participants to see and respond to each other’s design exercises as they progress; It allows for architectural projects, and indeed worlds, to be rebuilt and remade. It is easy to imagine how Minecraft design exercises could easily form assessment tasks and would provide students with a basis for developing a Minecraft architectural portfolio.

But playing Minecraft is not the same as designing architecture. Just like the MOOC, there is a problem when the medium of delivery becomes a poor simulacrum of design practice and the production of architectural knowledge in the real world. Living in the game isn’t really architecture.