VIRTUAL: Applying Education
Abstract
A typical university inclusivity statement reads, “We commit ourselves to the changes required for a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment to better reflect all peoples who share this space.” In architectural education, this space is real, and the experience of real environments is the foundation of the educational experience. But is immersion in real environments available to “all peoples”? Poor, urban, and minority students have traditionally been underserved by environmental education. Can? This project argues that higher education can create a more inclusive environmental education experience for all peoples, and proposed innovative, experimental educational strategies and technologies to test this argument. Nature-based Extended Reality (NXR) may provide a path for all people to share in the benefits of nature-based learning which are the foundation of environmental design education. Those benefits include improved performance among disadvantaged students, reduced dropouts among “at risk” students, and reduced race- and income-related gaps. The technology employed in this project is Extended Reality (XR). XR enables an extension of reality while blending virtual graphics with real-world elements. In XR, learners can experience many of the benefits of nature-based education without the cost of field trips that can be prohibitive for some. As a pilot for the NXR educational experience, our team integrated XR experiences and technologies into a graduate design seminar. Students worked in interdisciplinary teams to develop resilient community design strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change. NXR enabled the students to design the project collaboratively in a virtual reality environment.
George Elvin is an Associate Professor of Architecture at North Carolina State University, where he explores Architecture for Extreme Environments. In 1981 he founded his own design-build firm, and in 1998 received his PhD in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. He has delivered lectures and workshops in over 25 countries. And he has been an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.