|
 |
|
MADE: Design Education & the Art of Making |
26th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student College of Arts + Architecture, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 18–21 March 2010
MADE: Design Education & the Art of Making seeks to appraise the role of making past, present & future, both in teaching design and in the design of teaching.
The conference aims to examine theories & practices addressing fabrication & craft in all studio disciplines, and to take measure of their value in pedagogies of beginning design.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
David Leatherbarrow
University of Pennsylvania, author of Topographical Studies
Simon Unwin
University of Dundee, author of Analysing Architecture
SESSION TOPICS INCLUDE:
- Making real
- Making virtual
- Making pedagogy
- Making writing
- Making drawing
- Making across disciplines
- Making masters
- Making the survey
- Open session
500 Word Abstracts due: Friday, October 30, 2009
Notifications: Friday, December 18, 2009
Final papers due: Friday, February 12, 2010
Jeffrey Balmer & Chris Beorkrem , conference co-chairs
History
Over the past twenty-five years, The National Conference on the Beginning Design Student (NCBDS) has aimed to bring together educators from across the United States, and beyond, to discuss issues and opportunities arising from the teaching of design to novice students. Learning design is founded upon the acquisition of special skills, but more importantly, the education of a designer involves new ways of interpreting and imagining the human environment. It thus requires of the student entirely new modes of thinking.
The primary role of NCBDS is to serve as a national forum for the dissemination of emerging and effective models of design curriculum. This annual conference has showcased the work of innovative and effective instructors, and has served to advance the development of pedagogical research. Further, NCBDS serves to build the case for Beginning Design as a unique discipline, characterized by its own particular challenges and opportunities.
MADE: Design Education & the Art of Making is the theme of this year’s conference, hosted by the College of Arts + Architecture at UNC Charlotte. Our theme is inspired as much upon the tradition of craft and manufacturing characteristic of the Charlotte region as it is upon one of the primary preoccupations of faculty and students at the College: the exploration of both traditional and emergent techniques of making, in its various iterations and practices.
Keynote Speakers
Our conference will be headlined by two keynote lectures, delivered by two significant figures in the current discourse on Design and Making:
David Leatherbarrow is Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Philadelphia, where he has taught since 1984. He received his B.Arch. from the University of Kentucky and holds a Ph.D. in Art from the University of Essex. He has also taught in England, at Cambridge University and the University of Westminster (formerly the Polytechnic of Central London). He is primarily known for his contributions to the field of architectural phenomenology. Questions of how architecture appears, how architecture is perceived, and how topography shapes architecture often direct his research. Among his published works are: The Roots of Architectural Invention: Site, Enclosure, Materials, Cambridge University Press 1993, Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology, and Topography, MIT Press 2000, Architecture Oriented Otherwise, Princeton Architectural Press 2008.
Simon Unwin is Professor of Architecture at the University of Dundee, Scotland. He has taught and lectured on his work in China, Israel, India, Sweden, Turkey and the United States, and is author of several works, including Analysing Architecture, now in its third edition, and translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Farsi, and Spanish. Clear and accessible, Analysing Architecture opens a fresh way to understanding architecture. It offers a unique ‘notebook’ of architectural strategies to present an engaging introduction to elements and concepts in architectural design. Illustrated throughout with the author’s original drawings, examples are drawn to illustrate analytical themes and to show how drawing can be used to study architecture. Since its first edition appeared in 1997, Analysing Architecture has established itself internationally as one of the key texts in architectural education.
Session Topics
Paper presentations will delivered within a set of eight themes derived from the overall focus on Making. The team of moderators (indicated in parentheses) will drive the agenda of these themes, and arrange paper presentations into specific sessions indicated by the schedule. Abstracts will be reviewed in a blind peer review process.
Making Real
Moderator: Greg Snyder
Making Real (and exploring the real) will involve questions and practices surrounding the fabrication of physical artifacts as an integral part of design pedagogy. The scope of the papers may range from issues that focus on craft, construction, and technology, to the examination of how the experience of these artifacts conditions the understanding of the lived environment. Projects, practices and pedagogies ranging from the investigation of architectural constructs to sculpture and installation constructs to food constructs will be considered. There is the hope that this paper session will sponsor a discourse on both normative and speculative pedagogies in foundation design studies.
Making Virtual
Moderators: Nick Ault, David Hill
In the past few decades, digital technologies in the design professions have transitioned from a fringe condition of research to one of primary concern and necessity. This trend within practice has been paralleled in architectural education. To this point, however, it has been concentrated in advanced areas of coursework such as parametric methodologies, generative systems, analytical applications, and digital fabrication. While digital media courses are essential components in most architecture curricula, they have not had a consistent impact on the education of the beginning design student.
Digital tools—from modeling software to CNC machinery—have profoundly altered architectural thought and production. This session will examine pedagogical approaches that question the fundamental character of the design process. While the integration of digital tools/media is firmly established within many core curricula, the utilization of these tools for anything more than representation has been slow to develop. Digital methods of representation can transform the design process, but these techniques are generally utilized as a re-presentation of traditional techniques in a new medium.
This session seeks to investigate the various methods by which digital tools can effectively alter the formative years of a design student. It will examine how these technologies and techniques are permeating coursework, either as novel exercises within an established curriculum or as adaptations of existing coursework.
Making Writing
Moderators: Nora Wendl, Ann Sobiech-Munson
In 1988 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari asserted, “Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.” (A Thousand Plateaus) In this context, writing moves from a subordinate, merely referential practice in relationship to visual and spatial disciplines and becomes itself something made.
Undeniably, writing is a form of making. However, from the vantage point of disciplines in which ‘making’ engages materials more physical than words, our relationship to writing as both practice and product is complicated. For most disciplines that ‘make,’ writing about the work constitutes a frame rather than an object ; this is not so for writers, who engage writing as a craft that generates its own textual objects. Many designers rigorously maintain a distinction between the practices of making, as associated with the production of objects, images and spaces, and writing, as associated with the framing of these products. As a result, writing is understood as apart from, not a part of, other modes of making.
This session seeks papers that explore the ways in which writing practices expand and inform the disciplines of ‘making’ in beginning design pedagogy. How is writing used instrumentally, as a design tool, to explore and develop design work? How is writing itself a carefully crafted object that, considered alongside other ‘made’ things, enters into dialogue with them? What is the current role of writing in beginning design education, and what realms are yet to come?
Making Drawing
Moderators: Thomas Forget, Kristi Dykema
Drawing is a vehicle of thinking. It forces us to question our assumptions and motivates us to discover new avenues of inquiry. This session seeks papers that address any aspect of the interrogative and/or revelatory natures of drawing. The objective of “Making Drawing” is to compile a wide array of pedagogical and creative instincts related to the role of drawing in the design process.
A particular (but by no means exclusive) focus of the session is the relationship between analog and digital modes of communication. The embodied experience of analog drawing creates an intimacy between reality and representation that digital tools cannot replicate or supplant. At the same time, it is naïve to believe that beginning design educators can retreat into a purely analog world. How are traditional modes of communication relevant to contemporary architectural education? What are the unique advantages of digital drawing? How can analog and digital techniques complement each other? Or, should beginning design curricula exclude either analog or digital modes of communication altogether? Strong opinions are as welcome as inquisitive speculations.
We invite papers that are historical, theoretical, and/or pedagogical. Above all, like the process of drawing itself, we seek to ignite a healthy debate and to further the discourse of beginning design education. How do we define drawing today?
Making Pedagogy
Moderator: Michael Swisher
Pedagogy for this session topic is defined as the discipline of teaching, as it pertains to foundation design curriculum whether theoretical or practical.
This session topic seeks papers discussing either of two topics: 1) the inclusion of making activities within a design pedagogy, 2) the process of crafting a pedagogy. Either may address any scale from a single project, project group, course, course sequence or curriculum. Actual sessions will reflect the range of the submittals.
Making Connections
Moderator: Janet Williams, Patrick Lucas
The process of making is the outcome of different modes of thought - from the linear, goal-oriented ‘design’ approach, to the hands-on learning through material ‘craft’ approach, to a more open-ended experimental ‘art’ approach. Can the design process embrace both convergent (following the scientific method – orderly, logical and empirical) and divergent (less tightly focused, inventive, inspirational) thinking and their radically different approaches to making? The objective of Making Connections is to present a selection of papers from a historical, theoretical or pedagogical perspective that investigate the process of making across different disciplines, what informs that process and how that process determines the end result.
Making is a process that is preceded by a design, drawing, outline, plan, pattern or sketch and requires an aim, idea, intention or purpose. Making is: to bring into being, build, construct, compose, craft, execute, fabricate, form, model, mold, produce, shape. In general, making requires the use of the hand, or the extension of the hand through tools – though more recently mass production techniques and digital technologies have taken making one step further from the hand and its human sense of touch. How do we expose students to a range of approaches in designing and making? Does a pre-planned design approach lead to a predictable result? What role does ‘hands-on’ experience play in a digital world? Does digitally controlled making limit or expand a student’s experience of working with materials? We are seeking papers that explore these (and other) questions related to different approaches to making and the process of making.
Making Masters
Moderators: Jose Gamez, Peter Wong
Making Masters will explore the unique challenges facing graduate degree candidates who begin their studies equipped with degrees outside the discipline of architecture. In this sense, these individuals are on a trajectory of “remaking” themselves as they venture away from their previous course of study. The session therefore sees graduate students in their beginning semesters of an architectural curriculum different from their undergraduate counterparts. From which point of view should educators prepare these students? Are we to embrace the depth and diversity of their knowledge taking into account the interdisciplinary outlook that may emerge in latter parts of an architectural curriculum? Or, should we consider a complete “retooling” is in order by carefully acclimating them to the culture, idiosyncrasies, and craft of a specialized profession?
These questions and others provide starting points for our conversations in this session. We seek proposals for papers that illustrate successful design methodologies for teaching fundamental skills at the graduate level; we also seek papers that illustrate thoughtful attempts to craft a pedagogy that somehow met with failure. As well, we seek papers that help to articulate a pedagogy aimed at instilling a sense of craft and a belief in making things through the active engagement of media of all types within the context of a graduate education.
Making the Survey
Moderator: Emily Gunzburger Makas, Rachel Rossner
The history survey is ubiquitously present in departments of art, architecture and design is typically required early in a student’s education. Whether in the first or second year, whether western or global, whether offered as a two, three or even four semester sequence, these history survey classes are remarkably similar from school to school. Despite attempts to broaden their scope and incorporate new approaches in art and architectural history and theory, most surveys are still a series of lectures that chronologically present brief exposures to the “canon” of key sites, works, designers and artists.
This conference session seeks discussion of innovative approaches to the art, architectural or design history survey. We welcome both untested new ideas about the survey as well as reports on successful examples of courses that were differently organized, in which the material was presented in non-traditional ways, that included different types of assessment and student activities, and/or that linked the survey more directly to other components of design education.
Open Session
Moderators: Jennifer Shields, Bryan Shields
Will aim to arrange papers of merit into sessions that have a focus outside of the seven topics listed above.
Conference Deadlines
500 Word Abstracts due: Friday, October 30, 2009
Notifications: Friday, December 18, 2009
Final papers due: Friday, February 12, 2010
|
|
School of Architecture - UNC Charlotte
9201 University City Blvd. Charlotte, NC 28223-001
Storrs Hall - 704.687.2336
(C) 2009 School of Architecture - University of North Carolina at Charlotte
|
