Roots of a Digital Studio

Information Age has been transforming architecture, provoking its theoretical and methodological foundations. We might call this as a paradigm shift or not; it’s obvious that contemporary research fields and built practices lead architectural design into a certain revolution. Mainstream schools of design education are becoming more involved in this revolution, with a common purpose; the need to construct a logical connection between contemporary design theories utilizing methods called popularly as “digital architecture”, and all aspects and agents of a design studio pedagogy. Although the conception of digital architecture and the idea of reciprocal transformation between design tools and cognitive domains of designing are generally recognized, there is no concensus on how these transformations and conceptions should be handled in education.

New design thinking constructs possibilities for novel design methods. Educational settings are also becoming integrated into these environments, developing new educational methods. As the foundation of these methods lie in new modern design thinking (not design tools, nor geometries), they are flexible and more open to diverse interpretations. That’s why there might be no consensus for the answer of above question; how these can be handled in education? Abstract, tectonic, problem-based, phenomenologic, or etnographic; all kinds of design domains could be interpreted within this new design thinking. We should be going far beyond the old arguments based on design tools such as hand-eye coordination vs. computer-aided design.

As a studio instructor, I sometimes feel uncomfortable at deciding a pedagogical method, fixed with a practical output. Usually, thinking about pedagogy and praxis seperately results results a more diverse combination of design exercises, where pedagogy (why we do this in studio? What is the reason, starting point of it?) and praxis (which tools they should use? What kind of a design process we want students to experience?) could be identified and manipulated seperately. This experience reminds me that there is still something to be learnt from design education; while students are both free and limited at the same time.

Although parametric modeling refers to a wide range of utilizations in today’s design, core intention lies at associative geometry. Educational institutions reacting the fundamental paradigm shift in architecture usually re-organize the educational content and pedagogical method of design geometry. They are transforming the content because of the new demands of the shifting paradigm, and they are transforming the pedagogical method, assuming that learning is active construction of knowledge; over both abstract and tectonic domains of design.

In the experiments presented at this website, I put myself and my students into a design environment that is based on the flow of digital design data. We believe there are many more conceptions and practical methods to express dataflow in contemporary parametric modelling. Potentials we derived from the undergraduate and graduate studios of architecture are continuously evolving, in order to achieve a control over the process of dataflow, explication, manipulation and restriction of digital design data, as we feel, they’ll be more important in the future.

However, effect of the computing method is usually left behind in today’s educational settings. This website emphasizes that, fundamental part of a parametric modeling and geometry education should incorporate with related fields such as algorithms. Such awareness would give more power to the design education in searching for it’s adaptation.