Design thinking diagram: A tool for decision-making (2024)

AMPS: Education, Design and Practice – Understanding skills in a Complex World, 2019

Designing for a complex world requires architects to think critically, creatively, and collaboratively. To support the development of this skillset, the atmosphere of the design studio in architectural education challenges students to develop ideas creatively and critically reflect upon their conceptual designs for given projects. In design education, thinking collaboratively does not need to be solely defined by the sharing of ideas and information among peers, but instead can be applied to how architecture and its site can collectively inform one another throughout the design process to achieve a desired solution. Often, students are taught to sequentially operate within the design process by observing, recording, and then responding to it conditions with an architectural intervention. This procedure, while beneficial in teaching students to acknowledge and appreciate the contextual environment for their design, can be misguided as it emphasizes the site as a given, invariable constraint that is static and impermeable in nature. Architectural design involves a mediation of the designer’s intentions with the site. As such, students should be encouraged to consider architecture and the conditions of the site as malleable, accommodating bodies.This paper will present a series of projects, introduced to students in their second-year of study, that encouraged students to break the sequence of observe, record, and respond to allow site and architecture to be responsively in dialogue with one another throughout the design process. At the outset of each project, students were asked to blur the demarcations of architecture and site, among the earth and beyond to the sky, towards discovering ways in which the architecture and its contextual surroundings might respect, respond, and support one another to cultivate a desired user experience. These exercises offered students an avenue to creatively and critically maneuver the design process while promoting collaborative thinking between architecture and its environment.

Each time architecture tried to provide solutions to problems within the city with deterministic means, the result was definite and rigid without taking into account the dynamics that characterize an urban environment. These formalistic approaches studied the existing environment and tried to 'tame' it with concepts and master-plans that followed a particular line of thought. The prevailing belief at the time was that those approaches, which were theoretically valid, would balance and rationalize the existing conditions. They did not take into consideration, though, the 'invisible city,' the forces that act within it, and the overall complexity of the urban environment which cannot be dealt with a singular formalistic proposal.This paper refers to a university research project which was inspired by the wish of contemporary design interventions to re-define the city following new readings and using digital design tools. Our academic interest lies in the new dialectics formed between analyzing and developing the city under the conditions that the emergent design media have brought into the contemporary architectural education. Our intention is to examine the relationship between these tools, digital design techniques and a new urbanity.Initially our research project involved the critical analysis and comparison of 51 design courses, based in various schools of architecture around the world (Europe, United States and Australia). This analysis was further reinforced by interviews with people from the academia, widely recognized for their significant role in the development of the new approach. The key parameter for selecting and documenting these variations of advanced design studios was their focus in spatial dynamics and their interest in the use of mapping techniques and digital design tools. We were interested in exploring how these courses read the city and how they deal with the augmented complexity of contemporary urban space, its perpetual transformations, the ubiquity of information, and the consequent blurring of limits within such a spatial system. The objective of this comparative study was to find the common threads that run along the examined design courses.The research team concluded in critical factors that act as common denominators and moreover pinpoint a great shift in the traditional architectural education as we know it. The shift refers to the adaptation of flexible strategic approaches that guide the development of urban design proposals and coordinate the relation between the designer and the field of reference. These urban strategies are put forward in the place of master-plans.Strategies are manifested as a series of small judgments, confined actions, and local decisions which are articulated in response to field information. There is no intention to deal with the complexity of a problem in its entirety. Instead, the sequence of continuous interventions brings eventually the dynamic balance of the urban system. The success of a strategic approach depends heavily on complex controls and continuous feedback, both properties of the emergent digital design tools. The new mediums, and the design techniques that surface along with them, constitute the most important factor of this research study. All of the examined design courses have a computational infrastructure based on hardware and software systems that support a variety of visualization, simulation, modeling and rapid prototyping techniques.The study concludes with a proposal for an upgraded type of an architectural design studio. The proposal promotes the combination of research, experimentation and design attuned with computational media. It is rooted into the assumption that design is a cognitive process which progresses as a sequence of actions triggered by the information of the surrounding environment. This new type of studio is build up as a network of small individual but interrelated courses that inform the initiatives within a single design project. Above all, it encourages the direct contact of the students with the information of the examined field. The proposal was tailored so as to be applicable to any school that wishes to explore in its curriculum the contemporary city field with the tools and the techniques of the digital era.

Architectural design is an activity of synthesis and integration of many elementsrelated to architectural design, such as construction, building technology,culture, etc., in order to develop their own original creativity. This articledepicts the design teaching at The Bartlett School of Architecture at UniversityCollege London, where design is considered as a kind of integrated culturalrepresentation. The Bartlett style is all different kinds of thinking, attitudesand creating. They want students to think independently and to work inan interdisciplinary fashion. Meanwhile, Bartlett design studio is set up as acollection of units. Using the studio examples of Diploma curriculum and Unit20, the educational philosophy of architectural design for the Bartlett school isillustrated to develop the individual and guide him or her to make the most ofhis or her creative and design potential.

Cultural Spaces and Design - Prospects of Design Education, 2019

Halter, Regine & Walthard, Catherine (Eds.) for HyperWerk HGK FHNW Throughout the discussions about globalisation and design, what has been missing until now are deliberations regarding necessary changes towards a design education which puts conceptual acting in the context of global movements and problem situations. This publication pleads for a revision of design education. It addresses students, teachers, and design practitioners. On the basis of concrete examples, concepts, methods and tools are presented for discussion. They can open up new directions and possibilities of design education. Consequently, this book focuses on design students’ experiences and reflections as contributions to a design education understood as a school for differentiated perception. The local level – the respective Cultural Space – is appreciated as the actual hot spot of globalisation. The book offers reports, case studies, analyses, and reflections by lecturers, artists, and students about their wor...

Keynote Presentation as part of KLAF 2018, Kuala Lumpur Architecture Festival, Malaysia, 4 July 2018. ________DATUM:EDU04 July 2O18, 9:OOam - 6:00pm, Plenary Hall KL Convention CentreThe architectural profession is today confronted with an increasingly complex and challenging environment. From the local to the global, the international to the vernacular, architects have to continually adjust and adapt their practice in a fast changing milieu to engage with new shifting conditions both within the profession and externally. The new generation of architects are called upon to provide better answers and solutions, to lead and inspire in a world requiring ideas, beauty, optimism and inspiration. As part of the yearly Datum:KL conference, the inaugural Datum:EDU conference is a one-day event that seeks to explore the different methods of pedagogical approaches and formats of institutions and academies across the region and internationally. How does architectural education keep track with the CHANGES in our contexts and circ*mstances to remain relevant in an age of the contingent. Delegates from the South East Asia (ASEAN region), Malaysia and internationally will gather in Kuala Lumpur this July 4th, 2018 to meet, network and discuss current issues on architectural education and its direction.

Visual Research Methods in Architecture, 2021

From the ‘Introduction’ to the volume by the editors:“What is or should architecture and architectural research concern itself with in a globalized, contested twenty-first century? This question drives Tariq Toffa’s architectural pedagogical practice at the University of Johannesburg. Chapter 3, entitled ‘How to draw a line when the world is moving: Architectural education in times of urgent imagination’ by Toffa, argues that architecture’s contemporary purpose is to produce agency rather than products. Arguing that globalization neglects the social, Toffa contends that an ethical imagination in drawing is needed to generate new visions and voices. Drawing from Arif Dirlik’s argument about the inseparability of the aesthetic and the social, Toffa exposes the power relations inherent in Euro-American-centric ‘visibility’ as having a significant influence on architectural design pedagogy and spatial designers. Through speculative, mixed-media drawing work, promoting a dialectic method and working explicitly with difference, Toffa’s studios explore research inquiries and conditions informed by methodological tactics of ‘voicing’, ‘multi-modality’, ‘siting (surfacing)’, ‘spaces of publics’, ‘territory’, ‘perspective’ and ‘reflexivity’. Noting the recent shifts in sociology and art history, where ‘sociological reflexivity’ is used as a research tool (d’Oliveira-Martins 2014: 193), the aim of Toffa’s and his students’ pedagogic work is to refocus an ethical imaginary that transcends and re-writes disciplinary and racial conventions through site-specific actions. Drawing can make social power relations visually tangible and Toffa’s essay makes an original contribution by presenting new drawing practices for research that decolonizes and emancipates space and architectural education.”(Troiani & Ewing 2021, Introduction: Visual research methods and ‘critical visuality’, in Troiani, I. and Ewing, S. (Eds.), Visual Methodologies in Architectural Research. Intellect publishers, 2021.)

Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe (eCAADe)

Charrette, 2021

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant effect on higher education institutions and in particular delivery of design and architectural education. The co-presence of educators and students and creating affordances for physical and material spatial experiences, as well as collaborative work, has long been at the heart of architectural education and its studio culture. This issue aims to capture the imminent changes that this pandemic promises and provide a platform for sharing pedagogic experiences, practices and perspectives for the future of architectural education.The rapid global transition to a distanced and remote mode of education on the one hand has created inevitable challenges in executing conventional practice using foreign media. Most notably, this has largely removed the situated representational practices of drawing and making from architectural studio teaching, placing a significant reliance on the use of verbal language, while accelerating the shift to solely digital outputs. It has also called into question the preparedness of educators and learners in adopting alternative forms of educations and brought heightened attention to the affective dimensions of effective learning, adding transparency to the hidden aspects of curriculum delivery, such as how assessment is appropriated and approached by educators and learners alike. Lastly, it has challenged the importance of place and space in architectural education not only as sites of embodied knowledge production but also as the very subject matter of the discipline, in a society where architectural space implodes to the extreme interiority of isolation. The relevance of problems, issues and methodologies explored within architectural briefs and curricula, design values and the expectations of both the society and professional bodies from architectural graduates are in this context put into question.Although there may be an expected temporality to this situation, it is also inevitable that changes in educational practice that have emerged from this crisis will have longer term implications for architectural pedagogy. This displacement after all aligns, to a degree, with pressures that have already been present: the shrinking of the space of architectural education due to the rising numbers of students; the shift to the virtual spaces of digitisation; the systemisation of assessment formulas. If, as a result of this pandemic, we can expect that previously speculative pedagogies will be further implemented into practice, what are the catalyst pedagogies, particular to architecture that might resist and condition this change? And, furthermore, how might these adapt to or appropriate such conditions and what are the threshold concepts that might emerge in the new era of architectural education?This special issue of Charrette, calls for scholarly contributions re-evaluating architectural education and pedagogies within a global scale, sharing critical responses and novel experiences of architectural education practice, drawing from the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on higher education. These can arguably be considered as the foundation of a group of catalyst pedagogies, portraying the image of flexibility and adaptability in the changing landscape of architectural education.Access to full issue via the URL

Materiality in the Architectural Studio Process Good Practices, 2020

This paper reports on work carried out within the module ‘Digital Space & Society as part of the MSc Adaptive Architecture & Computation course at UCL. I describe my approach in investigating possibilities for integrating digital media and computation into a module taught to students coming predominantly from a design background. The teaching adopts the design studio culture, which integrates: teaching, discovery (research), and application (practice). Here I present an attempt to develop new ways that extend beyond conventionally applied methods within traditional architectural education by adopting project based learning that is carried out in the real world. The project is driven by my recent research activities. Donald Schon’s concept of the ‘knowledge in action’ provides a useful framework for interpreting my approach.

EAAE-ARCC International Conference & 2nd VIBRArch: The architect and the city, 2020

Research, once associated only with academia, now equally connects to learning and practice in architecture, as focus has shifted towards a wider design research community. Research has become inclusive of formerly marginalised areas such as process-oriented and practice-based research in the arts and humanities as well as applied commercial research undertaken by industry. Providing a first study of this shift, this paper explores why design research is of growing importance to architecture. It systematically analyses a selection of current cases at the intersection of architectural practice and education within the UK to survey existing design research approaches, and asks: How can design research transform and create new architectural practices and forms of education? Following this question, the paper discusses some of the design research models used across architectural practice and education.

On Architecture, international conference and exhibition, STRAND, 2013

International Journal of Education in Architecture and Design (IJEAD), 2020

THE JOURNAL DOES NOT ACCEPT SUBMISSIONS UNTIL A FURTHER ANNOUNCEMENT.An individual initiative of mine as a self-motivated academician in architecture, supported from the foundation by very-well-known and expert academicians from all over the world by accepting my invitation... 💐The first issue published on March 2020 is attached here.International Journal of Education in Architecture and Design (IJEAD)Owner and PublisherEmine Köseoğlu, Associate Professor (PhD)Editor in ChiefEmine Köseoğlu, Associate Professor (PhD), Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakif University, Turkeykoseogluemine@gmail.comAssistant EditorsJames Thompson, Lecturer (PhD), The University of Melbourne, AustraliaSaadet Tuğçe Tezer, Res. Assist. (PhD), Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, TurkeyKimberly Connerton, Lecturer (PhD), Parsons School of Design, USAEren Kürkçüoğlu, Lecturer (PhD), Istanbul Technical University, TurkeyTechnical EditorsMüge Yorgancı, PhD Candidate, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, TurkeyAdil Ömer Çamaş, Architect, Adjunct Lecturer, İstanbul Aydın University, TurkeyGizem Dural, M.Arch., PhD Candidate, Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakif University, TurkeyErsan Yıldız, M.Arch., Adjunct Lecturer, Yıldız Technical University, TurkeyDamla Katuk, Arch., Adjunct Lecturer, Yıldız Technical University. International Advisory BoardProf. Dr. Ashraf Salama, University of Strathclyde, Department of Architecture, UKProf. Dr. Robert Špaček, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Department of Architecture, SlovakiaProf. Dr. Paramita Atmodiwirjo, Universitas Indonesia, Department of Architecture, IndonesiaProf. Dr. Lisa Findley, California College of the Arts, Department of Architecture, USAAssoc. Prof. Dr. Fang Xu, The University of New South Wales (UNSW Sidney), Department of Design Studies, AustraliaAssoc. Prof. Dr. Meghal Arya, CEPT University, Department of Architecture, IndiaAssoc. Prof. Dr. Claudia Westermann, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Department of Architecture, ChinaDr. Irina Tarasova, Ural State Academy of Architecture and Art, Department of Architecture, RussiaDr. Ana María Moya Pellitero, University of Évora, Centre of Art History and Artistic Research - CHAIA, PortugalProf. Dr. Ayfer Aytuğ, Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. Pınar Dinç Kalaycı, Gazi University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. Rengin Ünver, Yıldız Technical University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. Şengül Öymen Gür, Beykent University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. K. Kutgün Eyüpgiller, İstanbul University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. Canan Girgin, Yıldız Technical University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. Berin Gür, TED University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. Nevnihal Erdoğan, Kocaeli University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. Neşe Yüğrük Akdağ, Yıldız Technical University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. Nur Urfalıoğlu, Yıldız Technical University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. Görün Arun, Hasan Kalyoncu University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. İbrahim Numan, Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. Salih Ofluoğlu, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. Burçin Cem Arabacıoğlu, Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar University, Department of Interior Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. Neslihan Dostoğlu, İstanbul Kültür University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyProf. Dr. Ayşen Ciravoğlu, Yıldız Technical University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyAssoc. Prof. Dr. Polat Darçın, Yıldız Technical University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyAssoc. Prof. Dr. Hikmet Sivri Gökmen, Dokuz Eylül University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyAssoc. Prof. Dr. Ayşe Sirel, İstanbul Aydın University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyAssoc. Prof. Dr. Ülkü İnceköse, İzmir Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, TurkeyAssoc. Prof. Dr. Saitali Köknar, Kadir Has University, Department of Interior Architecture, TurkeyAssoc. Prof. Dr. Çiğdem Canbay Türkyılmaz, Yıldız Technical University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyAssoc. Prof. Dr. Olgu Çalışkan, Middle East Technical University, Department of City and Regional Planning, TurkeyAssoc. Prof. Dr. Selin Yıldız, Yıldız Technical University, Department of Architecture, TurkeyInternational Journal of Education in Architecture and Design (IJEAD) is an international peer-reviewed journal, published twice a year, March and September.Manuscripts in English are accepted.International Journal of Education in Architecture and Design (IJEAD) aims to publish curriculum models, course syllabus models, formal and informal studies/works, experimental works on architectural education and related design areas, and studies on assesments of quality of architectural education. The journal publishes research papers, review papers, discussion papers, and critique papers. These sections are peer-reviewed.IJEAD does not require any fee from the authors.

Conference Proceedings: The Challenge of Change: Addressing Global Forces vs. Local Realities in Architectural Education, 2016

Multiple, abrupt and often unexpected changes that cities face today due to globalization, massive internal flows of labor and migration, climate change, economic fluctuations and terrorism pose challenges of increasing complexity. On one hand, important global forces underpin the aforementioned changes, while on the other hand there seem to be alternative effects in cities around the world whose understanding entails taking into account local socio-spatial realities. Tensions between global forces and local identities entail a respective transformation of the built environment where the everyday life of the diverse and different groups living in cities unfolds. Contemporary urban contexts lead to an enormous increase in the complexity of the challenges architects have to deal with and have an evident impact on design practice and the design process itself; the latter has gradually become a complex process involving an increasing number of agents and types of knowledge. The future actors of the built environment, therefore, need to be trained to address effectively continuous changes and transformations, instability and the increased tensions between global dimensions and local contexts. Design studio pedagogy, still considered as the backbone of architectural education, needs to be informed and encountered in its broadest sense. This paper seeks to address these issues, in the educational context of the design studio offering a diversity of options on possible futures of architectural education. How well do we prepare students in an age of change and uncertainty? The tensions between global dynamics, cultural diversity and local realities are explored highlighting potential 'opportunities' to redefine the core of education for our future graduates by rethinking and redesigning the teaching and learning relationship.