ONLINE INTERNATIONAL DESIGN WORKSHOP: DESIGNING A TEAROOM TOGETHER (original) (raw)

2021, 14th International Symposium on Advances in Technology Education 17-20 August 2021, Turku, Finland

Since 2015 the NIT Akashi college has hosted an international design workshop where students from Brazil, Hong Kong, and Germany developed a design for a tearoom. The design workshop was part of a three-week Japanese Architecture course. However, in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, international travel became impossible, and we could not receive international students. Therefore we decided to hold the design workshop online. The online design workshop started in November 2020 and ended in January 2021. It had nine workshop sessions of 90min each, where the students met online and worked together on the design of a tearoom. The workshop had 53 participants and included students from Japan, Brazil, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Singapore. The platform used for the workshop was Facebook, and the online meetings used Zoom. The students' working groups had 5 to 6 people, and there was a maximum of 2 students from the same country in each group. They worked on the design for a tearoom and later had to explain their design using drawings and a five-minute video presentation. This workshop was part of an elective course for the Japanese students, and they worked together in the same classroom while having online meetings with their international group members. Two instructors monitored the online workshop sessions and assisted the students when necessary. This paper aims to offer practical teaching suggestions and to evaluate the efficacy of an online design workshop. It explains how we organized the workshop, the difficulties we faced, and analyses the workshop results. Using information collected from a survey and interview with the participants, we also evaluate the workshop's impact on the students.