Sustainable Design Accelerator: Infusing Entrepreneurship and Evidence-based Design into Architecture Pedagogy

Development of systems-level thinking and an entrepreneurial mindset is invaluable to prepare architecture program graduates for challenges posed by the global climate crisis. This paper reports initial results from the Sustainable Design Accelerator, a funded project within our Master of Architecture program to advance student skill sets through entrepreneurship and evidence-based design. Prior to this project, our students valued entrepreneurship but lacked curricular opportunities despite recent faculty experience in the area. Additionally, existing courses on sustainability provided only a broad overview of sustainable design principles, with little opportunity for hand-on exploration. By stacking a lab course and a studio course, a semester-long sequence was created, introducing and applying a comprehensive suite of digital and analog tools for entrepreneurship and evidence-based design. In the lab course, tool introduction and application occurred within the context of a design challenge to produce innovative and marketable passive cooling system prototypes, while in the concurrent studio course, students applied tools to calculate environmental impacts at a whole building scale for proposed designs of a multi-family housing community. Both courses featured workshops by national experts in entrepreneurial studies and product life cycle assessment, as well as reviews by practicing architects specializing in environmental stewardship. In addition to direct assessment of learning outcomes, exit surveys were used to assess student perceptions of knowledge depth and the value of newly acquired skills. Survey results and faculty observations resulted in modifications to a second iteration of the Sustainable Design Accelerator, to be delivered Spring 2022.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.110.36

Volume Editors
Robert Gonzalez, Milton Curry & Monica Ponce de Leon

ISBN
978-1-944214-40-1