Curriculum in Focus
Learning by Doing: Workshops as a Pedagogical Tool to Learn through Experience View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sofia Quiroga
The literature suggests that students from architecture and other design disciplines should learn by doing. The workshops as students’ extracurricular activities, characterised by the personal learner involvement, represent a fantastic opportunity to learn through the experience that requires student’s free time and passion for keeping on learning. Often considered as informal training, the workshops are a fundamental and complementary tool for the completion of the student’s learning process and shortcomings, therefore used as an active architectural pedagogy. It allows them to acquire competencies out of the classroom and some necessary skills for the practice, regarding materiality, technology, construction process, and collaborative skills, which are fundamental to the practice. The format of workshops allows the interdisciplinary approach, emphasising collaboration processes, team dynamics, discussion, interaction, and exchange of information among the participants. The design and the construction process involve students in a dialogue that requires mutual understanding to find solutions to design problems through creativity, establishing their objectives with a particular focus on the collaborative exchanges among and across disciplines. These collaborations allowed the students to integrate into multidisciplinary teams as a part of their learning process, being an essential qualification to face and achieve future creative independence. The study explores the methodology comparing two different workshops characterised by the collaboration of two different professionals’ profiles leading them. The paper analyses complementary competencies and design approaches and the importance of the interdisciplinary collaboration among teams, and their influence to acquire professional skills in the Chinese context.
Photography, Design Culture, and the City: A Photographic Exploration of the Urban Environment
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Susan Close
This paper provides a critical overview of a transdisciplinary graduate-level photography course at the Faculty of Architecture, the University of Manitoba that combines the practice, theory, and history of photography. The course takes place over three weeks in Montreal, Ottawa, and Winnipeg and concludes with a temporary exhibition of student work. Students use the city as a guerrilla classroom and analyze social and cultural spaces such as galleries, markets, neighbourhoods, archives, prints, and drawing rooms, and have conversations with a variety of cultural workers and photographers. Image making is informed interdisciplinary concepts, such as adaptive reuse, mapping, framing, mise-en-scene, and derive drawn from the writings of Sally Stone, Graeme Brooker, Mieke Bal, and Jane Tormey related to the intersection between photography, design culture, and the city.
Toward the Development of a Systemic Approach on Graphic Design Teaching: The Graphic-Semantic Expression Map View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cátia Rijo
In the design field, it is common to use moodboards as a way to visualize ideas, concepts, or even references and inspiration elements for the realization of projects. Moodboards are a type of visual language themselves that can consist of a collage of images, text, or samples of objects that inspire design. They can be one of the most valuable tools in the whole design process because they can be fast to initiate and provide early direction and insight shaping the time-consuming stages of design development (Garner & McDonagh-Philp, 2002). In the end, the works presented by students often do not reflect all of the work that they have in the early stages of a design project. This paper presents a new tool for graphic design that intends to help students with design projects, "The Graphic-Semantic Expression map" (GSEM). This tool aims to help organize, gather, and filters expressive codes, synthesizing a structure of connections to the visual statement useful to the design project. The proposed map tries to overcome the difficulty of collecting these elements and aims to help the student designer at the intersection and interpretation of the images that the students collect. In this paoer, we will also report the results of the implementation of the GSEM in the creation of the brand mark for the "Association Against Femicide". The aim is to assess whether or not this tool helps students in this process of brand creations without limiting their creativity.
