Three things that could change the Faculty of the Built
Environment for the better:
More design thinking will teach us
the best ways to solve design problems. There
is a growing school of thought that encourages applying a process of design
thinking to solve problems. Governments,
big-businesses and schools worldwide are beginning to realise the potential of
thinking creatively to fix things that aren’t working but we aren’t being
guided towards this new way of thinking. Currently we’re being taught to evolve
our own process of approaching a brief from beginning to end but is this still
the most relevant way of teaching students how to think? Back in the day there
were a lot more contact hours with tutors/mentors having a lot more time to
sculpt the design approach students take and suggest why a particular approach
might not be suitable. Students had the
opportunity to be exposed to the approach tutors have learnt from experience. It is debatable whether this is still possible
with diminishing contact hours and increasing class sizes, in a 4 hour studio
with 15 students a tutor only has 16 minutes with each student a week. This is
hardly enough time to help each student to learn how to think. What we need is
an alternative approach to teaching design thinking. We need to be taught the
process of approaching a design and the theory behind why this is the best way;
we can’t just be expected to find our own way.
What I’m talking about is already being taught elsewhere in schools like
the
Strelka Institute in Moscow or the
Stanford d.school, students are being
taught how to think more directly. The d.school actually has a bunch of
designthinking resources available for anyone to just pick up and
use, they break
down the design thinking process into five modes: empathize, define, ideate,
prototype and test. Possible solutions would be to run compulsory design
thinking workshops for all students in the faculty or have a core-design
thinking course in all BE degrees.
Subscribing to Lynda.com
would solve the problem of many BE courses not providing enough software
learning resources. You’d think that since learning a particular piece of
software (Sketchup, Autocad, Revit, 3dsMax, Photoshop, Indesign ) is usually an
integral part of learning how to design then the courses we pick up should teach us
how to use them.. unfortunately this isn’t always the case. Courses often
expect students to “jump right in” and start using new software straight away, as
a result leaving many students to self-learn software with little resources (if
any) while still being required to meet other course outcomes. The fact is that
not all the resources we need when learning these software packages are always
available to us for free on the internet. Whether we can find the most
appropriate resources at the time is another problem (one that Fbesoc is attempting to resolve with the
dwiki). Purchasing an
institutional subscription would automatically fix this problem by providing
students access to quality tutorials on just about every piece of software
students are expected to learn. Up until this happens students will have to pay
an extra
US$250 for something they are technically already paying for.
Architecture 2030 asks
architecture schools from across the globe to do one thing and that’s to add
the following design requirement to every brief given to students:
"the design engage the environment in a way that dramatically reduces or
eliminates the need for fossil fuel"
The idea being to establish an awareness of the environmental
impact architecture has and the consequences of design decisions. Currently,
the building industry accounts for as much as 30% of the world’s energy
consumption; adding the requirement to student briefs is part of the
Architecture 2030 challenge to make the building industry carbon-neutral by
2030. The architecture program at UNSW already requires students to complete
two core
environment courses which educate students to take into consideration
environmental factor when designing, so it only makes sense to follow through and
connect the theory with the practical design studios. Doing so would ensure
students get a practical understanding of how to reduce the environmental impact
of the buildings they design as well as learn how to be creative in these
solutions.
What do you think could change the Faculty for the better? Leave your comments
below!
