Developing a Pedagogical Model for Biophilic Design: An Integrative Conjecture Mapping and Action Research Approach (original) (raw)
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Action research and architectural sustainable design education: a case study in Brazil
International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 2019
Research to improve aspects of architectural design education produced a collection of research-supported best practices and these lessons need integration into the studio environment. Design instructors must innovate, but in ways that allow previous result analysis. Action Research (AR) is seen as a valuable asset for providing an opportunity for systematic documentation and reflection of tested variables. This paper presents an ARenriched architectural design studio teaching experience delivered to third year Architecture and Urban Design students and devised to support individual design process development of students, framed by bioclimatic and sustainable design of school buildings. A 5-year AR project sought to identify (1) the points where undergraduate architecture students "got stuck" during design development; (2) why they had difficulties to fully understand and integrate sustainability concepts into their proposals; and (3) which contents and approaches could help them to overcome design blocks and produce sustainability responsive quality designs. Our research involved 150 students while taking the studio between 2013 and 2018. As a design process takes time to be consolidated and assimilated, positive response was clearer in relation to students' interest, behavior and demonstration of understanding of the body of knowledge. Significantly improved student design outcomes were not yet confirmed. However, our findings validate AR to improve a design studio setting through accumulated learning by instructors and detailed documentation and systematic analysis of the effects of a collection of approaches, tools and protocols could be applied to independent analysis to increase the quality of architectural design with sustainability in mind.
Journal of Green Building, 2019
Design is a structured process or a tactical guideline to accomplish a unique expectation of a product, while a design studio is the environment where students are taught the skills to design the product, which may be a building. Hence, the design studio course is the most important component of the architectural education curriculum; it is where the students get an opportunity to apply the theoretical knowledge gained through lecture-based courses. Yet most theory is not put into practice; consequently, the principles of sustainable design solutions are developed. There is an urgent need to teach future architects how to integrate sustainable design principles into their projects in order to prevent or mitigate environmental degradation due to the negative impacts of building projects. This experimental study initiated a new design studio pedagogy and a novel teaching structure for integrating sustainability principles into the architectural design projects of 3rd year students. It...
A new beginning for teaching Design for Sustainability
2018
The project of design's engagement with sustainability over the past two decades has been fraught; one, the discourse has been about consumption and western lifestyles, and two, the construction of the practice of sustainability has been reactive. For a long time design positioned itself as a profession that would react to design briefs set by a client and this directly created a format for design for sustainability as an activity of redesign. When engineering adapted methodologies of manufacturing practice, such as TQM and value engineering, to include issues of pollution they created new special-izations of engineering that could handle incremental transformation of product manufacturing towards more environmentally appropriate practice. The fact that big industry would not be needing designers to work of the eco-redesign of their products did not dawn on the profession of design and even less on design academies. This fact of being repeatedly rendered irrelevant in the discourse of sustainability is the essential character of design's engagement with sustainability over the past two decades. However this fact is not acknowledged and quite effectively hidden as the profusion of published outcomes allows design to talk within its community of practitioners without needing to seek acknowledgement from the wider world. As a marginal discourse sustainability is high profile and very visible in exhibitions, websites and books. Queried as a valid practice with examples of best practice design has little to show. I propose to create a still point where we can pause and ask if the new fascination with service design and social innovation is valid in its claim to be the new face of design for sustainability. I propose that it is not though it does expose a fundamental flaw in the way the practice of design was constructed in the last century. I then go on to show that the emerging trends point to interesting possibilities of reinventing the practice and for the complete transformation of the way we look at studio practice in design education.
Updating the ideas that shape our buildings: teaching design with sustainability in mind
Ideas that shaped buildings were based on principles and specific design processes. Traditional architectural education focuses on the process across the design studio sequences, whilst engineering training usually concentrates on applied sciences principles. Synthesis of these two approaches is both the major goal and challenge. The ideas that shaped architecture were mainly formal aesthetic, functional, technical and economic aspects of buildings. Since the 1970s, the desire to apply scientific methods and concerns for users, have sought to improve both architectural design and education. Engineering education, on the other hand, has greatly benefited from the development of IT instruments, equipment and software, that indeed facilitate calculations but introduce new variables and risks connected to the so called "black box syndrome". New ideas have come to the forefront, such as: 1) innovation, 2) environmental comfort; 3) psychology; 4) urban impacts, 5) larger insertion of computer aided design tools and foremost 6) sustainability. This paper addresses some related questions: Has the accumulated knowledge on the creative process been applied in architecture and engineering formal education? Does user comfort deeply permeate design proposals? Must designers be made more accountable for their action? Can computers participate more effectively in the design process and its teaching? What kind of changes is needed in design education? Is the concept of sustainability clear in its application to building design? Reflexion on these questions indicates that the implementation of "green building design" cannot be simply prescriptive or based on a traditional design process with its distinct phases of: analysis, synthesis, evaluation and definition. There is a need to deepen the conceptual knowledge of designers of the first principles of sustainability. New team compositions are necessary to share the same knowledge and achieve what is termed collective intelligence. The information transfer rate must be rapid. Education should focus on the strategic, tactical and operational management of a sustainable building design process. Productivity and a recognized quality of sustainable solutions are among the questions that remain and should be studied in professional practice and in formal design education. Index Terms design and engineering education, sustainability, building design.
Testing and Evaluating Sustainable Design Practices
This paper presents an in-progress design research conducted by teachers and students of Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) and the University of Houston (USA), in the form of a Habitation Laboratory (HabLab) design studio and in connection with a Sustainable Living Lab project.
WAYS OF INNOVATING IN EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DESIGN PRINCIPLES
In the field of contemporary architectural thinking, students are usually taking the terminology “Sustainable Design” as a theme in their projects. However, due to their lack of awareness concerning the principles behind it, the expression ends up being a baseless word that affects directly their project evaluation. In order to avoid the misuse of such a social impacting ideology, students must be conscious of several principles and guidelines for reaching sustainable design ideas. A definition of a series of criteria of sustainable design must be introduced to students as parameters for their design. This paper discusses some ways to provide awareness of sustainable design principles by emphasizing the basic approach considerations. They are mainly based on building awareness about sustainable education for a later survey to support the design principle. By such action, a definition of a series of parameters can be clearly defined during the design process, and later the data can be inserted in simulation tools to evaluate environmental performance of the design according to sustainable principles. In the end, a series of measurements will be shown as criteria to evaluate projects to support the designers’ decision in addition to increasing awareness when conceiving sustainable design.
A collaborative action research project towards embedding ESD within the higher education curriculum
International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 2017
Purpose – This paper aims to present a collaborative action research project conducted at the University of Southampton with the aim to promote curriculum and professional development in education for sustainable development (ESD) and learn from everyday practices of academics. Design/methodology/approach – An action research approach guided by participatory and emancipatory approaches was used. An interdisciplinary group of five academic staff members from different subject areas (education; archaeology; electronics and computer sciences; biology; and health sciences) was created with the aim to support the group’s critical reflection and action towards embedding ESD in their teaching practice. Findings – The main outcomes of delivery of sustainability teaching achieved through the project and evidences of the impact of the facilitator role are outlined. The facilitator role has enabled reflection and action, together with the identification of specific needs of academics and the factors influencing their engagement and action. Originality/value – This research demonstrates the potential of using action research to rethink current practice in embedding ESD and to lead to new practices and actions of communities of practice. The facilitator role and second-order action research can contribute to better decision making of sustainability as it questions practice, current assumptions and worldviews.
Enhancing Critical Sustainability in the Design Studio: An Action Research Project
2019
Sustainability is a complex and contestable field. The architectural design studio typically frames sustainable design as a technical, performance orientated exercise, often at the expense of contextualised responses which address the conflicting needs of a range of stakeholders. Sustainability is often viewed at odds with "design", in part driven by teaching structures which outsource sustainability to satellite units, elective modules or specialist consultants. This paper describes an action research project to enhance integration of sustainability into the architectural design studio. It took place over an academic semester on an MArch
Sustainable architectural design education: A pilot study in a 3rd year studio
A design studio is the heart and soul of the architectural education curricula where students learn to make repetitive design decisions that result in design strategies for resource use in order to create an environmental system that reacts to the human needs and requirements, or solves existing problems. Integrating sustainability principles into undergraduate design studio is an urgent need to teach young architects sustainable design principles that can stop the continual environmental degradation of our planet. This study proposed a new design studio pedagogy for integrating sustainability principles with a method to test the new pedagogy and the students’ final products. This paper presents the tests results of the pilot study and provides recommendations for the following semesters experimental design studio.