Pedagogy 2025
Abstract
Architecture graduates today, predominantly from Generation Z, often enter practice with a high level of fluency in digital tools and visual media. Yet many practitioners note that new professionals encounter difficulty integrating technical knowledge and applying creative autonomy in early-stage collaborative practice. Studies in cognitive science suggest that extended exposure to digital environments can contribute to diminished exploratory reasoning and fragmented attention. These tendencies are not yet fully addressed in architectural education. Studio cultures that emphasize polished visual outcomes may unintentionally reinforce them. Informed by Embodied Cognition Theory, this study introduces a pedagogical approach centered on embodied, discursive, and collaborative heuristic exploration. The studio process was shaped through collaboratively developed heuristics, enacted through student inquiry and instructor guidance. The studio drew directly on Sou Fujimoto’s Architecture is Everywhere approach, which invites free-associative exploration of found objects as three-dimensional design prompts. Building on this practice, the studio developed an embodied model of design thinking, with the objective of cultivating an architect’s theory of mind in students. Within this approach, each design medium was treated as a distinct Heuristic Set, engaging its intrinsic affordances. The studio unfolded through a sequence of recursive activities: ideation with found-object models, gestural sketching, and translation into digital construction. This process emphasized embodied and spatial reasoning to counter cognitive patterns shaped by two-dimensional, image-centered heuristics. The results suggest that embodied, heuristic-based methods can help counter cognitive patterns shaped by prolonged digital immersion. Studio models that develop an architect’s theory of mind through embodied and heuristic exploration may offer a productive direction for curricular innovation.
Angus Eade is a designer and educator working at the intersection of Architecture, Industrial Design, and Emergent Technology. Eade is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Kentucky. Eade received his Master’s degree from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design [2003] where he was a recipient of the Araldo A. Cosutta Prize for Design Excellence and the James Templeton Kelley Prize for his work on integrated building systems. Spanning more than two decades, Eade’s professional career prior to founding his own practice.