Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

As designers of the built environment, tools and techniques used in education can be presented to students as part of a larger process relationship that ultimately considers material realities. In the fall of 2023, a university ran the third course in a three-course Hybrid Representation sequence delivered during the foundations program of the BARCH and IARC programs where students translated objects from our physical reality into digital space, transformed them using digital modeling techniques, and then delivered the objects back into our physical reality using digital fabrication tools and methods. At each stage, students were asked to consider scale and materiality. One of the projects in this course offered students an opportunity to tour a custom architectural manufacturing facility to learn about the steps needed for their designs to become a real built object. In an assignment that coordinated with this tour, students began by working with a folded paper sculpture. Then they modeled their sculpture using a parametric modeling software and at the manufacturing facility it was laser cut from sheet metal and folded along designed perforated cuts. Introducing digital fabrication tools to students in their beginning design education helps to make connections between our model making tools and the manufacturing of architecture. With the introduction of digital space in the contemporary design process, it is important that design students have a foundational understanding of both scale and material reality, especially when using digital modeling and fabrication tools.