Collaborative Approach to the Spatial Journey- An Experiment in First Year Architectural Design Studio.

An architectural design studio is a place for learning, experimentation, and exploration. Design of a built environment has constantly remained a collective activity where the architect, client, structural engineer, surveyor, service contractor, mason, and many others work together for a common goal. In the traditional design studio model, a student is expected to follow a set of design procedures like ideation, conceptualization iteration, and finalization to arrive at the outcome. He is supposed to design a built form based on context, climate, socio-economic parameters, and function using appropriate materials and technology. Often the process becomes a drool if the student is allowed to follow the sequence all alone. He or she may get stuck and lack motivation. But if the studio pedagogy involves discussion and an endeavor to explore rational thinking by adopting learning by doing together which may involve peer group discussion and continuous inputs from faculties, the process becomes much more interesting. A pupil studying architecture needs to cooperate and engage in design studios with his or her classmates and faculty. In addition, the students need to confederate, to achieve the objective of learning in a way that prepares them for the extremely synergistic phenomena of the architectural profession. (Crosbie, 1995; Daniels, 2002).This research aims to understand the effectiveness of design studios that can work in collaboration to refine every partaker’s contribution to the design methodology. The research was supervised as a semester-long exercise that integrated forty-six students from the first-year Architectural Design program, at KLE Technological University, India. The author explored quantitative analysis in the form of rubrics along with qualitative parameters like peer assessment, faculty feedback, and student response in the design process.