VIRTUAL: Learning. Life. Work.

Abstract

At the heart of an education based on learning-by-making practices is the idea that all students are creators. As such, maker education and the maker movement rely on hands-on, discovery-based, collaborative experiences where projects focus on experimentation and problem-solving for the act of learning to occur. Ideas that originated with Dewey, Freire, Piaget, Montesorri and specially Papert’s constructionism pedagogy have manifested today as a culture of making. Unlike traditional teaching methods, maker education encourages students to learn, not just by watching, but by doing. The idea of do-it-yourself or more accurately do-it-together, emphasizes the learning process rather than just the end-product. As we are going through the reassessment of our Interior Design Program, we have been experimenting with the inclusion of learning-by-making components throughout our curriculum. We are creating a maker-centered learning environments, where students can imagine, design, and create projects that align the content of learning with hands-on experimentation. The focus on this article will be on the addition of a design-build component to our studio sequence, covering our observations since its implementation in 2017. During this intensive studio, students experience and understand the design-make-design cycle, address client parameters, learn to produce construction drawings, integrate universal design principles, respond to multiple contexts, integrate landscape, learn collaborative design skills, and physically build a permanent one-to-one project. But the real learning experience is about collaboration, about community, about complexity, and about themselves.