My pedagogy focuses on the intersection of representation (tools) and space making (product). The intersection of tools and product becomes the fulcrum for design exploration, allowing students to create cognitive relationships between problem solving and expression. During the past five years I have explored this approach in advanced digital representation seminars and in the design studio, developing a clear and consistent methodology.
The process of representation is fundamental in the design process, setting the framework for site exploration. As a pedagogue it is necessary to frame the process of site representation as a heuristic operation, allowing students to construct unique tools. Students are asked to conduct multiple explorations following a fast (iterative) and slow (obsessive) regimen, developing a modal relationship with prescribed programs. The duality of obsession and iteration creates student work that is both macroscopic and microscopic, stretching pedagogy across scalar dimensions.
I have explored this intersection in my representation seminars and design studios with projects that are developed through an external framework. Representation projects typically explore the relationship between representations of the hyper-real, diagrammatic, and fanciful. Students are asked to represent landscapes described in literature, contemporary media, and/or classical precedents, exploring the process of representation through storyboards, technique demos, and reviews of the workflow. Students gain a more intimate knowledge of the processes required to create technically and cognitively complex modes of representation and can then ideally make informed decisions on methods for incorporating these skills into their studio work.
Within the design studio students are asked to develop explorations and research inspired by site based phenomena and/or external inputs. Design studios focus on the representation of site analysis, research, precedent, or phenomena using hybrid techniques. Students are introduced to web or network based technologies to explore landscape linkages, video and animation to describe or analyze phenomena, and analog/digital modeling to express complex scenarios.