Hapticity in Digital Education Atmosphere

This article focuses on the effects of the decreased ability to perceive touch in distance learning for all of the actors in architectural design studios during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. As part of face-to-face architectural pedagogy, the tactile experience of architectural materials, models, and corporeality in the studio environment assumes great importance. However, in contrast, these aspects are diminished when it comes to digital education, generating new topics for discussion. This article asks how and to what extent distance education models can affect the process of learning, understanding, discussing, and designing architecture, amidst the prospect of continuous digital education in the post-pandemic period. Hence, it examines the awareness and experiences of haptic perception of first-year students at the Istanbul Aydın University Department of Architecture through in-depth interviews recorded on Zoom. Between 2020 and 2021, the interviews investigated haptic perception, observed construction techniques, factors affecting design materials, the way and place in which materials were perceived, the methods of sharing and transferring designs with studio instructors, questions about the obstacles encountered, and expectations for the post-pandemic period. The outcomes of these in-depth interviews showed that there is a close relationship between the students’ bodily interests and their awareness with regards to perceiving materials and that the former indicated a tendency towards making models. It was observed that students had preferred digital design tools in the pre-pandemic period, and in addition to the digital tools that students often use as a design approach, they negotiated as designing through hand-drawing in order to gain the “thinking with one’s hands” experience in this study. This emphasizes the need for haptic experiences in an architectural educational environment.

A Design Task for Sivas Grand Mosque’s Minaret: Vertical Construction/Formal Articulation/Visual Stimuli

As well as a design process, experimental practices in architectural education are associated with the analytical approaches of visual thinking and visual reasoning. The main purpose of this study was to explore creative methods for devising a vertical construction through visual reasoning. In terms of experimental practices, design research is based on exploration while the primary research area in architecture is reframed by constantly renewed approaches. Accordingly, the hypothesis of this study was that creative methods would improve when the creation of a vertical construction in architectural education is nourished by visual stimuli. The study searched for a construction that plasticized the vertical spatiality of Sivas Grand Mosque’s minaret. The method was shaped by a prerequisite dialogue that rests on visual stimuli. The expected outcome of this dialogue was that the minaret as a pure form would be subjected to an abstraction and, a design proposal then developed for its current structural problems. The results indicated a two-fold appreciation of design. First, when the minaret was maintained within the idea of stabilization rather than being construed as a pure form, the search for a creative method of vertical construction was handled in the context of static preservation. Second, when Sivas Grand Mosque’s minaret as an imaginary design tool was construed as a pure form and the abstraction level increased through visual reasoning, the outcomes gradually demonstrated an approach akin to experimental practices

The Interpretation of Graphical Features Applied to Mapping SWOT by the Architecture Students in the Design Studio

The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of how the architecture students deploy a range of graphical features to visualize SWOT, standing for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Architectural design studios provide students with a range of analytical techniques, and SWOT analysis is considered to be useful and effective, particularly at urban-scale design projects. However, it is a text-based framework and needs to be converted to thematic analysis maps across architecture and design fields. The main issue is that the determining factors affecting the way in which students choose graphical features to map the outputs of SWOT analysis is unclear at architectural design studios. The research employed qualitative methods, specifically observation, focus group, and graphical analysis, to examine SWOT maps produced by the architecture students. The findings demonstrated that the selection of graphical features in the process of producing SWOT analysis maps are dependent on scale of study (macro, meso, and micro), as well as location, spatial connection, and size of elements derived from SWOT matrix. For instance, lines and planes were most frequent features at macro level while the variety of symbols remarkably increased at micro level. In conclusion, the students personalized the process of mapping, meaning that they applied point, line, plane (shape), color, texture, and typography in several different ways. Therefore, SWOT analysis not only help architecture students to better understand the problems of their design projects, organize and consolidate information, and visualize opportunities and constraints, but could lead to the representation of realistic solutions in an innovative way.

An Attempt to Fill the Gap between the Architectural Studies and Conceptualization in Architectural Thesis Design Studio

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the application of a theoretical framework in the architecture thesis project to discover the effectiveness of the exercise on the thesis projects. It was common to observe that the students prepared the architectural thesis project with limited, unstructured, or disconnected studies to analysis, programming, and conceptualization phases. A theoretical framework model was tested to evaluate the effects on the learning outcomes of the students. The methodology of the research was designed based on structured observation and content analysis. The findings of the research reveal that the students perceive and understand the studies and the theoretical framework differently. The students demonstrated their theoretical framework with four categorical specifications including information, application, presentation, and communication. The information referred to data and structure of the organization, the application implied the relation between the data collection, analysis and other phases of the thesis project, the presentation illustrated how they applied graphical tools to illustrate the data, and communication revealed the interaction between the students and the panel of juries and participants. In conclusion, the theoretical framework connects the studies to the concept generation and opens a new door for the discussion of the architectural studies and lessons learnt between the panel of juries, the students, and peers. For an effective expectation from the theoretical framework outputs, detailed guidelines could harmonize the students’ outputs due to the varieties of the application, interpretation, and demonstration of the architectural theoretical frameworks.

Using a Brand Identity-Focused Project Structure to Improve the Competencies of Product Design Students

It is essential to reflect the strategic connotations of the brand on the products while creating and developing a product design that fits the brand identity. Therefore, for a company, it is a critical issue to place the right messages that support the strategic brand identity in the design elements. From the designers' point of view, they are expected to have design skills such as analyzing a brand's uniqueness and brand knowledge and reflecting the results of these analyses on the aesthetics, function and overall meaning of the product. For this reason, as a part of the Industrial Design curriculum, brand identity focused product design has been restructured in Atılım University, Industrial Design program. In this studio course, the aim was for design students to acquire skills of brand identity and product identity analysis, in addition to basic design knowledge and skills. During 16 weeks, the data were collected by doing a participant observation and conducting semi-structured interviews with the course students. The data gathered from the semi-structured interviews and participant observation were analysed by using an inductive coding approach. Thus, product design suggestions that were suitable for the identity of the brand were analysed with the questions asked by the instructors during the design process. The results show that the questions asked by the instructors and the examples they gave, led the students to research, think, question, understand and make sense of the importance of information. As a result, the students obtained design outputs suitable for brand identity.

Zobo Tea Package Design Prototype Allied with Product Onomastics

The purpose of this design is to create a Zobo tea package design prototype allied with African indigenous onomastics. African indigenous products are effective in terms of functionality; however, industrialized products gained more attention because of aesthetics, safety, hygiene, and other advanced technology put into consideration during production. This seems to boost the inferiority of indigenous products. Hence, the present study focuses on indigenous Zobo tea in terms of creating a conceptual package design prototype enhanced with product onomastics. Twenty-two names are derived for indigenous Zobo tea by making use of linguistics techniques. These names are used as label for designing a conceptual package prototype for indigenous Zobo tea. A Delphi technique is adopted for the evaluation of this creative process. The findings show that homonym as an onomastics will enhance the branding and development of indigenous Zobo tea even in the international market. This will remodel the inferiority of the aesthetics of Zobo indigenous products. Hence, research on the choice of an appropriate name for a particular product should be a contemporary research area to improve the present situation of our indigenous product branding and graphic design. It is believed that the outcome of this research could provide guidelines for effective naming in product package design for indigenous product development; as creative designers must not only understand the vocabulary of graphic design but be aware of extraneous constraints that could affect their designs.

Dialogical Structure Experience in Basic Design Studio at Online Education

In this study, the structure of the basic design studio that started with face-to-face education and had to end with online education due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was set over Bakhtin's dialogic concept, is discussed. The three main components of the basic design studio; studio space, studio process and studio content and the combination of these components have changed in the transition from face-to-face education to online education. With these changes, dialogic relations are defined in the basic design studio's setup that extends from the face-to-face to the online education, and a structure that is shaped not as a sharp transition but as a flow has been developed. The basic design studio structure, which is shaped by the concept of dialogue, is presented as an approach proposal for online education, which is still ongoing and is expected to continue.

The Instrumentalization of Fictional Narrative in Relation to Architecture-Urban Environment: The Example of “Laughable Places” Workshop

Interdisciplinary approaches and distinctive representation methods are needed to expand the range of meaning in the architecture and to consider the design process in unique frameworks. Literature disrupts the static images produced for the city in the context of the imaginative weight and the various dynamics it makes with the reader also uses the city, space, and architecture to create a different dimension of representation. This situation, which is inspected in the article regarding the relationship between literature, city, and architecture, will be examined through the "Laughable Places" workshop, that is part of the e-workshop days held at Gebze Technical University in February 2021. In this sense, firstly the relationship between literature and architecture and the revealing of their potentials are handled through the imaginative, representational and textual dimensions. Than through various workshops where the relationship between fictional narrative and architecture is applied, it is reviewed in which contexts fictional narrative can be included in the intellectual process of design. This review has been grouped according to the method in the workshop setups, using the fictional narrative based on literary works or the writing fictional narratives by participants. The workshop process was interpreted through the hybridity of the two approaches.

A Critical Assessment of an Extended Learning Environment in Interior Design Studio

This paper presents a critical assessment of an interior design studio that was constructed face-to-face then online as an extended studio environment through spatial and technological means. In the Interior Design Studio III, students were expected to design an experiential retail store aiming at answering the contemporary customer and brand interactive experience. The concept of ‘interactive experience’ was central not only in terms of a project outcome but also of the studio process: an experiential learning environment is designed to enhance the understanding of the design studio. Within this scope, the collaboration with the maker lab of the university provided technological interfaces and analog model making methods while also expanding the limits of studio space. The interactive experience would not only result in the project outcome but also be integrated to the studio model. This studio model and the topic was conducted face-to-face in the campus three semesters consecutively, while the following two were held online. The study is based on exploratory research using qualitative techniques to analyze the design process of the students in the face-to-face and online experiential learning environment. The main objective is to overview and assess the interior design studio by providing a new perspective to the students about space and user relationship regarding interaction and atmosphere not only in terms of the given design problem but also the ‘environment’ they are experiencing the ways of design.

Intuition in the Design Studio: A Perspective on Student’s Creativity and Design Process

In the twentieth century, as a result of the transition to a scientific approach in design, intuition lost its validity and design became a rational act. In well-defined problems, the design process could be structured with this scientific approach, however, in an ill-defined structure, rationality needs to be combined with intuition to analyzing the design problems, decisions making and generate solutions by supporting the creativity of design students. In this respect, intuition can assist to strengthen and develop the required abilities during the process. Accordingly, the aim is to understand the role of intuition, how students use it to work creatively through sketches, and conceptual ideas, and the problematic process of transformation into architectural knowledge in the design process. The study carried out a literature review to draw an understanding of the dimensions of intuition and its role in the architectural design studio. The results of the study demonstrate that intuition has a crucial role in the design process. Relatedly, the lack of intuition becomes problematic, due to the non-conveyable character that it cannot find a place for itself in the design education in terms of crits from tutors, and alteration of intuition into concrete representations leads to a gap between intuition and the final project. Furthermore, these problems could be eliminated through the coherent use of two features which are rational approach and intuition. In this respect, intuition, creativity, and rationality is needed to perform together in order to achieve success by deciphering the potentials of the project through the process.