Effective Educational Models
Spontaneous Architecture, A Retrospective: Ten Years of Design Pedagogy in Israel and India
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sharon Rotbard
The studio for Spontaneous Architecture was founded in 2005 at the Department of Architecture in the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem and was active until 2016. According to the short brief, "At Spontaneous Architecture, students invent experimental straying techniques, explore improvised construction materials, and develop immediate technologies. During the program, the students build the first building in their career and spend there the last night of the semester". During this decade-long activity, students of Spontaneous Architecture realized dozens of built structures in various sites in Israel and in India: a temporary winter shelter for Jerusalem's homeless people; an observation tower located in one of Israel's poorest desert periphery but overlooking one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth; a children's campus at an agricultural education farm in post-earthquake rural Gujarat; Sanitary off-grid toilets and showers in Tel Aviv's cut-off and forgotten tent city. All of those projects were public or advocating public causes and communities in need. All of them were self-designed and self-built by the students in zero-to-low budget. Most of the structures were ephemeral; some of them were temporary; few of them are still standing. Spontaneous Architecture is the 2012 recipient of the Arieh and Eldar Sharon Award for Creative Students and winner of the first prize of the AIQ Best Project of the Year 2012 in the students' category. Studio's projects have been published and exhibited in the US, Korea, India, Germany, and Israel. Additional information about Spontaneous Architecture is available at http://www.spontaneous-architecture.org/.
The Context of Design: Seeking Greater Empathy Through Psychological Models
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Terrence Mahlin, Brian De Levie
The contemporary practice of design harbors great potential to affect social, cultural, or behavioral change. To create successful change initiatives, the design of solutions, artifacts, and communications must acknowledge sociopolitical, economic, and cultural contexts and work within specific value systems and worldviews. Achieving this deep, comprehensive empathy – traditionally the domain of anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists – is one of the greatest challenges faced by design professionals and students. As designers are increasingly relied upon to develop solutions in the service of mankind, there is a clear need to integrate some fundamental knowledge of humanity into design education and professional practice. It is impractical to suggest a designer seeking to be an effective agent of change must also be an expert of human behavior and culture; however, psychological models, such as Clare Graves’s Spiral Dynamics Theory, may suggest effective methods for integrating a practical and exceptional level of empathy into design practice. This paper examines how Graves’s Spiral Dynamics Theory, an established, holistic psychological model, might be leveraged to stimulate a more empathetic, emotional, and culturally aware design practice. The investigation seeks to explore: Can the integration of Spiral Dynamics Theory into design practice help produce sensitive and effective solutions for foreign cultural and social contexts? Can psychological models help designers understand how humans operate in a continually changing environment of learning and adaptation? Can such models help designers consciously change their “lens” to view the world through the strengths, struggles, and potentials of others?
Design Education for Positive Social Impact
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Irem Ela Yildizeli
Since the industrial revolution, design has always played an important role in society. It also affects cultural development, social identity, and forms a better life for people through information and technology. Therefore educating designers play a major role in the process of cultural and sustainable development. This study presents a book project created with the aim of creating a positive impact on our social community in Turkey. The project was developed in the 2015-2016 Autumn semester by 72 undergraduate students from the first-year visual communication and graphic design program. The starting point was The Turkish General Election of November 2015, which led to social and political discussions and created communal subversion. The conversations within the studio centered around researching oral stories around the country and projecting them visually to reflect our cultural diversity which gives our country its richness, color and dynamism. The May 2016 exhibition, “Our Village” discussed in this paper, is the result of their investigations and creation.
Designing Disciplines: Extending the Use of Pattern Languages and Ontologies into University Curricula
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Vampola
Many theorists of design have sought some kind of modeling language that can guide the composition and arrangement of artifacts and spaces of various kinds. For example, Christopher Alexander (along with his group at UC Berkeley) attempted to establish a pattern language for architecture. Their vision has been appropriated (whether or not they encouraged it) by researchers in disparate fields, such as computer and information science. Hence, the consequence - intended or not - is for the concepts of design theory to extend outside its own subject area. Given this expansive trend, is it possible to apply design principles to the definition and development of academic disciplines? Here it is assumed that disciplines (unlike their more inchoate counterparts, fields of knowledge) have well defined features (as well as learning outcomes) and also play a definite role within the institutionalized frameworks of educational establishments. Since disciplines have these roles, they can be designed with patterns that are instantiated within the social settings of institutions. A primary way of approaching the design of disciplines is by using a formal ontology that provides a standardized vocabulary, as well as a taxonomic framework that defines the discipline's attributes. In addition, activity diagrams that are explicitly part of Universal Modeling Language (used primarily in software engineering) can help represent the institutional constraints of adopting a discipline within a curriculum. In this paper, digital humanities, as an emerging discipline that can be defined using these design approaches, is considered as an example.
