title: Augmented pedagogies
Creators: name: Veliz Reyes, Alejandro
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2016

description: Traditional institutions of the architectural design studio such as the design critique or the design jury are at the core of studio pedagogy. Yet, they have shifted and evolved over time towards what can be hardly defined as the typical master-apprentice “atelier” praxis anymore. Design studio pedagogy, deeply rooted into our disciplinary ethos, is under pressure due to a series of factors such as new industry demands, ever-evolving technologies or the diversification of architecture’s collaborative contexts of practice. While the design studio comprises a series of cultural, social, technological and educational mutually interdependent dimensions, this research specifically focuses on technology-mediated teaching and learning communication. By following a grounded theory approach, this work attempts to formalise and describe technology-enabled emergent studio pedagogies. In more detail, the observed technologies in this thesis are those of augmented reality visualisations embedded into design critique sessions, and the use of Wikis for online communication throughout a studio course. The research question pursued along this thesis is, then, “how do the use of AR visualisations and the use of supporting Wikis impact on communication in the architectural design studio?”. For such enquiry, it is claimed that the integration of technology into architectural education contexts does not proceed only on the grounds of tools’ development and training, but on a series of complex interrelations across technological, communicational and societal patterns that once orchestrated, provide a vehicle for such technology-driven pedagogies. However, the observation of the architectural design studio as a social setting mediated by technologies comprises to not only conduct extensive observational work, but also to question and reflect upon how its constituent institutions (e.g. the design critique, the design jury) are potentially augmented by technology. In that sense, this research has been conducted as a “cognitive ethnography”, by taking into account both experimental and observational research procedures to unravel its communication dynamics in the context of actual design studio settings, as opposed to highly controlled lab-based design scenarios. As a result, a series of research methods and techniques are described to operate as a participant observer in such settings, their practicalities and limitations, and the theory informing such methods. The main contribution of this approach is the collection, transcription and analysis of on-site gathered data, therefore grounding the research results to the contexts in which they operate - supporting the validity and applicability of the research outcomes. The resulting theory outputs - namely “theory of augmented pedagogies” - describes the emergent communication dynamics resulting from the use of such tools. Its construction process is as follows: After observational data is analysed following an incremental coding process, a set of conceptual categories (a set of conceptual categories) is created, and then linked to each other allowing the formulation of a framework. The framework, composed by seven categories, clusters systematically built evidence of the complex role of technology for architectural education purposes. The categories are: solo interactions, social interactions, technology affordances, troubleshooting, emotional engagement, multimodal engagement, and organisational shifts. Those categories are organised in two core topics that describe the impact of technologies in the architectural design studio: “augmented interactions” and “pedagogical implementations of technology”. Throughout the definition and scope of those topics, various links across pedagogy and technology are claimed. The outcomes of this research intend to serve as a pedagogical resource for integrating new technologies into architectural design studios, and organise those newly emergent pedagogies as novel educational resources. Since it is based on a grounded theory approach, the framework is also flexible enough to accommodate further pedagogical knowledge, and paths for future work are identified accordingly. It is concluded that amid diverse views and approaches towards architectural education, instructors mainly operate with little supporting pedagogical resources and mostly following an experience-based teaching approach. As such, new ways to organise and transfer pedagogical knowledge in relation to technology-enhanced learning, such as the one derived from this work, are a contribution to the work of architectural educators. On a secondary claim, it is asserted that the outcomes of this work also contribute towards the development of technology for educational purposes.