ARCH ED Design Research Collaborative

for communities and stakeholders (Krippendorff, 2006). As a licensed architect and part-time design education instructor, my interest in the field of communication emerges within the questions and observations through which I have experienced professional practice, and which, in turn, reflexively drive my research and praxis within architectural education. My pursuit of interdisciplinary studies in Humanities & Culture affords the depth and focus in research to engage a socially constructive dialogue between the fields of architecture and communication. My interest in higher education is a focus on student empowerment, and I envision myself engaging this pursuit as a teacher and mentor in both architectural education and advanced degree programs in communication. The passion that drives my pursuit is a fundamental desire to share personal insights and experiences, which I have come to understand as a socially constructive mode of design thinking. I understand architectural design as an investigative, communicative, and relationally interactive social dialogue occurring within a contextually diverse and continually emergent field of action and memory. As a pedagogical philosophy, I want to engage a field of interdisciplinary subjects, as a cognate or relationally intertwined and socially interactive way of being-in-the-world. My priority lies with understanding the field of social exchange, or to use a Bakhtinian term, the Novelistic Discourse (Bakhtin, 1981, p.344) within which our making, and not necessarily the things made, occurs. Wasiolek (1982) reveals some of Bahktin’s meaning writing:

…the novel is an image of how we communicate, and nowhere does he [Bakhtin] appear to talk about 'what' is communicated... The 'what' is never finished because it is always being addressed and thus changed. My purpose as a teacher in architectural education, especially with first year students, is to shift, at least temporarily and for the purpose of analytical praxis, common perceptions and attitudes that facilitate conceptions of architecture as a complete object. My activity in this regard functions in opposition to a conception of architecture where, as John Shotter terms, the “dead forms” (1999, para.1) of our social lives, or as I conceive it, the image of architecture, is our focus of study. I want to help students to begin to desire a new way of seeing the socially constructive, situationally responsive, and continually emergent life of architecture as a communicative mode of social being. Following, are excerpted notes identifying aspects of my current creative and scholarly work in design curriculum:

Position:
I want to discuss architecture as a form of social construction - not in objective terms, as discrete entities or linear causations, rather, in a sense of Heidegger’s Dasein or
being-in-the-world, such that the term architecture names an extant, relationally discursive, state of social emergence. In this sense, architecture…names one aspect of the way that social construction occurs – Architecture, as a Homeric epithet for a way of social being. From this perspective of being, I can address spatial communication…within analytical praxis. The conception positions all design activity within…social being, such that possibility is the context…

Pedagogical Rationale:
…The primary goal of this approach is to assist design students into fluid awareness and sensitivity to the virtually limitless possibilities of context interaction at scales ranging from the most intimate, to widening and interacting circles of social, cultural, geographic, political, historical and even cosmic scales. The process promotes student self-positioning as a participant in social discourse and the empathic embodiment of context-identity…

Student Project:
1. Commit to analytical method as a temporary treatment…to study specific moments of interaction...
2. use/observe three basic categories of action…:
- Organizational (datum)
- Programmatic (activity and scale)
- Material (physical elements organizing space)
3. identify and diagram interaction…of systems
4. identify types of interaction…
5. model three basic categories of…interaction:
- Incidental (collision; systems merge without change)
- Responsive (one system changes to accommodate another)
- Transformative (mutually informative, relational exchange)

References

Bakhtin, M. In Holquist M. (Ed.), Dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin, TX, USA: University of Texas Press. Krippendorff, K. (2006). The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation For Design. Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Print. Shotter, J. (1999). At the Boundaries of Being: Re-Figuring Intellectual Life. UNH Conference: Social Construction and Relational Practices. Sept.16–19th1999. Durham: New Hampshire. Wasiolek, E. (1982). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Book). Comparative Literature, 34(2), 174.