Investigation/Translation:

Teaching an Introductory Digital Studio with Analog Breakouts

Abstract

The role of this Architectural Design Studio (treated as an introduction to digital theory and technique) was to teach students that digital media offers more than the ability to represent final constructions. Too often (in architectural design and lower-level education) digital media is seen as being an end-game move, a technique and process reserved for the final moments of architectural investigation when it is time to display the results of process (a final building). Digital toolsets2 afford us the opportunity to articulate much more than just the resultant construction, so long as the means by which techniques are introduced are tightly choreographed. These toolsets afford us the chance to explore qualitative conditions of site, user, experience, and event, visualizing quantitative AND qualitative data in ways often infeasible and inappropriate through analog techniques. However, there have been (and continue to be) worries about introductory studios immersed in digital technique, from the ways in which students become mired in worlds without quantitative scale to the overwhelming amounts of technology that must be mastered as a means of bringing conceptual ideas to fruition. From animation to fabrication and every technique and toolset in-between, without clear guidance and a mastery of at least one toolset, students often rely on the resultant operation of the tool as the final result, letting the computer decide the direction of the project without clear articulation from the student.