Fourteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

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.