Developing Creative Thinking in Beginning Design

Stephen Temple, Stephen Temple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317224464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

Learning to think and act creatively is a requisite fundamental aspect of design education for architectural and interior design as well as industrial and graphic design. Development of creative capacities must be encountered early in design education for beginning students to become self-actualized as skillful designers.

With chapters written by beginning design instructors, De v eloping Creative Thinking in Beginning Design addresses issues that contribute to deficiencies in teaching creativity in contemporary beginning design programs. Where traditional pedagogies displace creative thinking by placing conceptual abstractions above direct experiential engagement, the approaches presented in this book set forth alternative pedagogies that mitigate student fears and misconceptions to reveal the potency of authentic encounters for initiating creative transformational development.

These chapters challenge design pedagogy to address such issues as the spatial body, phenomenological thinking, making as process, direct material engagement and its temporal challenges, creative decision making and the wickedness of design, and the openness of the creative design problem. In doing so, this book sets out to give greater depth to first design experiences and more effectively enable the breadth and depth of the teacher–student relationship as a means of helping your students develop the capacity for long-term self-transformation.

Part I
Creative Traditions in the Contemporary Design Educational Context

Chapter 1
Beginning Design

Seven Points

Michael Benedikt

Education in all fields is largely a process of intergenerational transmission, a “passing down” of bodies of knowledge, techniques, and attitudes, with the more agreed-upon ones passed down first to the youngest students. We should not worry too much, then, if, in architecture schools, teachers of first-year design studio lean toward reproducing the exercises and experiences they had as beginning designers. How else are architecture’s timeless, fundamental design ideas, procedures, vocabularies, values, and truths to be transmitted? Or if not timeless ones, those of an era?

The transmission process has a social-psychological dimension too, one which, in beginning design especially, reinforces its conservatism. Consider: most design teachers believe themselves to be good designers. And many truly are, such is their love of the subject. They are people who also believe that their insights into what buildings are, and how to design them, rest on solid foundations. If these foundations were to change, or were shown to be arbitrary or inadequate, then their institutional authority (not to mention personal confidence) as teachers would be shaken. And so it’s little wonder that beginning design instructors, especially, think of their own beginning design instructors—of years ago—with exaggerated reverence if not affection.¹ It would take a style or method revolution of some kind to have happened in the span of time between starting as students of architecture and starting as teachers of architecture for this not to be true.

What about revolutions that happen later in a teacher’s career, e.g., the analog to digital transition in the careers of teachers who were schooled before the ’90s? Curiously, the influence of this revolution remains blunted in beginning design. Is that because young students are “inexperienced with computers”? Today, hardly. Beginning design is the most conservative of the phases of architectural education because all agree that the foundations (as the very name suggests) of architectural design should be the last thing to be messed with. Being “basic,” they are where the deepest truths of architecture are lodged. They are where its most universal principles and operations are taught and where its claims to uniqueness as a discipline (dealing with shelter, space, form, order, function, scale, movement, structure, etc.) lie.² Moreover, it is in the process of learning these truths and principles that the habits are formed that are essential to the design process itself, a process which, although it happens in minds aided by paper, models, and now software, resembles nothing so much as speeded-up biological evolution with its cycles of reproduction, variation, selection, reproduction, variation… carried out while crossing a fitness-landscape tumbling with gusts of entropy and dotted with pits of rigidity. Of course, one needs principles to guide one. And instruments.

In result, what students learn in their first couple of studios with regard to all the above creates the category-bins into which all new material will be sorted for years to come. It establishes the procedures by which they will go about designing and the values by which they will feel themselves judged at school and perhaps over their whole careers. These procedures and values, once set, might elaborate over later decades like saplings growing into trees. But they rarely change species, as it were, without there also being some shock, some radical shift in values, method, or style across the whole fitness-landscape of architecture. The digital revolution of the last twenty years might have been one such shock, as I noted, but at most schools (as I also noted) it has yet to reach beginning design studios, and may never.³

Given these circumstances, I offer for consideration the principles I use when setting out a new semester of beginning design studio. There are seven in all. I address teachers of design. Teachers: forgive my presumption in occasionally adopting the imperative mood and critical voice.

1

Never devise a design exercise—a “project”—that cannot be done well by any measure by a beginner. It’s important that design exercises be challenging, of course, but not too. If no one in the class, or only one student, does a beautiful, gallery-worthy job of it, take it to be your fault for having implicitly made extraordinary talent a requirement of your class. If, on the other hand, the whole class produces gallery-worthy work, then you are at fault again for having made the project too formulaic, too easy, too automatic.

To enlarge: many teachers turn beginning design students into sitting ducks for criticism (which is not the same as teaching them) by setting projects that are well over their heads in scale, realism, or complexity. This “deep-end” treatment makes review time easy, of course. One just points out the many glaring mistakes. And it keeps intact the teacher’s high regard for his or her own (often only recently acquired) knowledge.

Other teachers, by contrast, resort to very abstract exercises combined with step-by-step formal procedures that, together, more-or-less guarantee visually arresting results from everyone. This strategy can make reviews gratifyingly technical and elusive and give teachers the reputations of wonder-workers. Such reputations are guiltily earned, however. Worse, it helps them (the teachers and the students) believe they’ve have limned a simple and viable way to design cool buildings forever! They are tricks, of course, that do no such thing; and they can permeate a school for years, like evil memes.

Try, therefore, to hit a midway mark between these two practices, one that results in, say, 20 percent really great projects, 60 percent good to OK, and 20 percent terrible. Aim at the majority of students knowing that real skill and real knowledge has been gained, with vistas opened up for more realistic work in the future, even as they did, indeed, learn a few tricks of the trade.

2

Related to this is the idea that well-written “briefs” or program statements do the work of driving design.⁴ They do not. And they cannot be traded among teachers like recipes. No teacher can adopt the program statement of another, and it is nearly always disappointing when the teachers of a coordinated year—be it beginning design or later—share the same one. I can see the argument for doing so: are design competitions not based on the same logic? And how else to make sure that a cohort of students covers the same territory or “concerns” in a larger, comprehensive curriculum? But there are losses doing this—and tragic ones at that. When a teacher “sets a problem” themselves, it’s their problem, after all, in more senses than one. It commits their hearts and their time, and that is as it should be. For in teaching design, nuance is everything. Personal motivations, preferences, and beliefs about architecture abound in teaching, embedded into the simplest, most innocent-seeming instructions. Now some might retort that a good cook can start with someone else’s recipe and still do things—great things—with it. That’s true. But in a real kitchen, the carrots are all the same, and passive. By contrast, most of what happens in a studio is unique to the people in it and to the work they do for months at a stretch. There are feedback cycles everywhere and personalities at work. There are talks, interim pin-ups, chalkboard demonstrations, slide shows, videos, software demonstrations, trips, and arguments. During these, the program statement usually becomes irrelevant or modified. Notice what short shrift they receive at final reviews. No strong student would defend themselves by referring to the program. Is this regrettable? No. It is as it should be.

Dialog in studio, as in reviews, should be infused with genuine rather than borrowed passion for both the people and the subject matter involved. It’s the kind of passion that comes with “owning the problem” and letting it evolve, not from tapping a sheet of paper about the “requirements” stated on it. Beginning design programs can be stated in twenty words or less. They can be presented verbally only, accompanied by movements of the hands and eyebrows. Adventure lies ahead. Were I not a good citizen of my school and mindful of the NAAB, all of my program statements would be like this, for beginning and advanced studios alike.⁵

3

So, how to coordinate an early design curriculum taught by several teachers simultaneously (as it is in most schools) on the common sense model of basics first without (a) resorting to use of cohort-wide briefs or program statements or (b) ceding the idea of basic design entirely to Bauhaus authority?

As coordinator of our school’s Vertical Studio sequence, which consists of the first four studios undertaken by our beginning graduate (M.Arch) students, I tried to develop a partition of the architectural design task into aspects that we called “streams” since they “run concurrently.”⁶ There are four streams: Ordering Systems, Human Factors, Construction, and Contexts. These are expanded on here and, importantly, are nowhere described more fully. Each can be treated in time-honored as well as experimental ways. The system permits.

• Ordering Systems: geometry, number, form, flow, space, structure (physical and non-), generativity, composition, juxtaposition…
• Human Factors: program/use, intention, occasion, diversity, health, human potential, institutions, culture, social life, perception, experience, meaning…
• Construction: methods, materials, fabrication/assembly, mechanisms, infrastructure, building services (M + E)…
• Contexts: political, economic, conditions of practice, ecology, climate, landscape, urban, and rural development…

Here’s the idea. Each teacher, in describing their prospective studio to students, is asked to advertise the relative weight (or emphasis) that each of these streams will receive in their upcoming studio. Students then choose studios so as to create either a balanced curriculum over four semesters, or, at risk to themselves, one with particular emphasis. The vertical studio coordinator helps ensure, through discussion with the teachers before the semester begins, that, averaged across all studios, all four streams receive around 25 percent of the total weighting each semester. At the end of the semester, students are polled as to whether the stream emphases in their studio were “as advertised.” (They nearly always are.)

The Four Streams model depends, of course, on the maturity that graduate students bring to managing their own educations over four semesters. It depends also on the self-knowledge—not to say honesty—with which teachers declare their biases and interests. The Four Streams model is the gentlest form of year-level coordination imaginable, trying to match the talents and enthusiasms of teachers with the talents and enthusiasms of students at the scale of a single, semester-long studio, while being comprehensive at the scale of a two-year, four-semester sequence. Whether something similar would work for early design studios in an undergraduate setting, however, is an open question.⁷ Also in question is whether the Four Streams model would work without the tacit understanding that design studio education should progress from smaller to larger projects and/or from simpler to more complex ones.⁸

Indeed, the Four Streams model cannot and does not control these last two variables, i.e., scale or complexity. The degree of “basic-ness” in these terms remains up to the individual vertical studio teacher to calibrate. Some further thoughts, then, on “basic-ness.”

4

The reader is no doubt aware of what “basic design” means in the Bauhaus sense. It means short exercises in two- and three-dimensional composition of geometrical elements: points, lines, planes, arcs, squares, cubes, pyramids… color, texture, repetition, assembly, sequence, positive, and negative “spaces,” etc., even “parameters.” They are “ordering system” exercises (in the Four Streams model) without or with very little habitational, architectural, or even structural consequence. The goal is to train the eye. The goal also is to cultivate craftsmanship and a kind of hands-on, “just do it” courage. These virtues however, are rudderless without agreement as to the look of good and bad design (sometimes called successful and unsuccessful “solutions”). Large amounts of talk can be generated by critics and among the brighter students as to why this “solution” is successful and that one not. But in truth, students simply have to get it. And where they “get it” from is not the talk but the affirmation of an indefinable look. It is from the repeated exposure to good designs, “successes,” as simply declared so by the teacher—a teacher who, by the same Zen-like transmission method, “got it” from their teachers.⁹ Judgment in these matters is far from capricious, but it is notoriously resistant also to rational explication. What the Four Streams model accomplishes, among other things, is the dislodgement of Ordering Systems from its privileged position as the only one basic to design, the only aspect that needs intuitive, by example, “getting.” In truth, all four of the streams can be treated basically—i.e., foundationally, i.e., simply, elegantly, and competently—by young students, before they are treated in an advanced way, and it is liberating to meditate on how:

5

Goodness operates not just in the esthetic realm, but also, of course, in the ethical realm, whose issues tend to accumulate in the “Human Factors” and “Context” streams of the Four Streams model described in Section 3. Indeed, for most people, goodness (and less so “success”) are first ethical concepts and only then, and derivatively, esthetic ones.

This view is uncongenial to architects (and only slightly less so for architecture teachers), who take the ethicality of architectural practice rather for granted. Architects also take the ethicality of what buildings do—for they too are agents—as not having a microstructure worth investigating. In truth, the ethical realm is an opportunity for artistic endeavor all its own, with subtleties of manifestation and moments of “getting it” just as mysterious. The average design teacher’s eye for ethical elaboration—for ethical beauty one might say—is dull by comparison to his or her eye for interesting light, shapes, and spaces. Does it have to be so? I am hoping not. A whole new territory waits for exploration.

My bravest attempt some years ago to follow up on this insight was to was offer a vertical studio called “Make Something Beautiful, Do Something Good.” The semester, offered in the early 2000s, consisted of two projects, each seven weeks long, chosen by students for themselves. They were preceded and accompanied by much reading, lecturing, discussion, example-showing, and music-listening. The students designed and made various and strangely beautiful objects: a working canoe made from two sheets of plywood, a bowl made of feathers. And they performed all sorts of good deeds: saved trees endangered by a development, gave dollar bills to strangers, volunteered at a recycling store, all with documentation. Result? The second project (“Do Something Good”) was as interesting as the first (“Make Something Beautiful”), but not as visually interesting. Reviewers found the second project harder to address with the critical tools presently available to them. It pointed out just the lacunae I described. The students adored the semester. It was a studio topic and format I never repeated, however, under gentle pressure to have architecture (i.e. proposed buildings) be the outcome of vertical studios.¹⁰ Which raises another problem.

6

Bedeviling all design teaching in architecture schools is a problem not shared by teachers of painting, sculpture, writing, drama, or music. It is that, in these last-named disciplines, students are able to produce works that are themselves very nearly all they can be or need to be: a painting hung, a sculpture placed, a story read, a performance heard in real space and time. Architecture students can show only scale representations of their buildings, accompanied by justifying narratives.¹¹ And these representations—especially 3-D models (most of which, today, are laser-cut from CAD models)—are examined on pedestals, as though they were dead birds, or on a computer screen, as though buildings were objects that can be spun freely in space or floated through, which, of course, they cruci...