Discussion: Three things that could change the Faculty for the better

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!