Digital Instruction and the Pedagogy of Hesitation

The reconfiguration of the world of embodied existence into a digital one over the past two decades has been a transition full of potential and possibility, but also one of pedagogical concern and uncertainty. Faculty in every school of architecture are still grappling with the challenges of building curricula that introduce digital modes of architectural production at the onset of design education while simultaneously maintaining a balanced emphasis on developing the student’s spatial and experiential imagination, along with its direct translation into architectural space.The generation of students entering architecture and design schools today are the first to be fully native to digital culture with computation, virtual existence, and access to information streams as equally relevant interfaces with the world as are the direct physical stimuli of lived experience. However, their fluency with computation does not at first appear to facilitate an innate ability to use digital tools to develop the spatial imagination or to create new synaptic connections between the spatial imagination and physical form. In fact, we often see the opposite. Rather than adding spatial depth, digital tools–everything from modes of production like laser cutters and 3D printers, to visualization tools such as Rhino, V-Ray, or Grasshopper–seem to flatten space.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2019.15

Volume Editors
Richard Blythe & Johan De Walsche

ISBN
978-1-944214-23-4