Keeping the Discipline in Play: Ludic and Participatory Constructions in the Undergraduate Thesis Studio

This paper describes a pedagogical approach in an under-graduate thesis design studio in which each student’s independent thesis is bookended with two assigned projects that encourage the students to examine their particular thesis propositions through frameworks of openness, participation, and play. In addition to offering useful critical perspectives from which to interrogate their independent research and design work, these frameworks also ask students to consider how the affordance to individuals of the ability to play with a designed work grants those individuals a degree of agency that must be reconciled with the agency of the designer. This encourages these undergraduate thesis students to understand architecture’s position within and value to society as one that must be continually negotiated.

Volume Editors
Jasmine Benyamin, Kyle Reynolds, Mo Zell, Nikole Bouchard & Whitney Moon

ISBN
978-1-944214-28-9