Designing for Change: Exploring Open Design Strategies in Architectural Design

While sustainability is increasingly considered a core topic in architectural design curricula, the dominant focus is still on technical and environmental aspects. Yet how the built environment becomes part of people’s (future) everyday living matters greatly. Its ability to meaningfully change along with uses, users and contexts is an important measure of sustainability. Taking into account use-related aspects, however, requires finding ways to deal with the uncertainty and complexity that this invites into design processes. Searching for approaches that acknowledge this uncertainty and complexity in how we teach and study design, we explored the value of weaving an open design approach into architectural education. We looked at attempts in industrial design engineering, specifically open-ended design and open script design. These strategies aim to bring into view the dynamic with which products become part of real environments that are ever-changing and unpredictable. We adopted an action research approach: in a compulsory course on actual topics we involved master students in architectural engineering as researchers to explore these strategies’ value and applicability in architectural design. The course module was offered twice. From the first iteration, reported on elsewhere, we learned that open design formalizes a mode of thinking that is latently present to students in their education and design work and connects to sustainability. In this paper we report on the second iteration and further explore this connection. Analysis of students’ work shows that they adopt a relational perspective, view¬ing sustainability as a quality of the relations between the built environment and its users. And that on a practical level, working with these strategies incites normative and future thinking in students’ spatial analyses—core competencies in sustainability literacy. The major challenge we see towards the future lies in moving on from applying strategies to developing a sustainability mindset.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2021.29

Volume Editors
Jonathan A. Scelsa & Jørgen Johan Tandberg

ISBN
978-1-944214-38-8