Excellence in teaching

Richard Weller is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts. Richard received the Excellence in Teaching Award in 2003. This award represents a joint effort by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.

The studio is the raison d’ etre of the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Art (ALVA). All Landscape Architecture and Architecture staff teach design studios. Other subjects concerning technical, professional, theoretical and historical matters contribute to the design studio. The design studio is essentially a creative hothouse where students and staff explore creative processes in order to form a response to a hypothetical design project. Both day and night our faculty is buzzing with about 20 design studios, an amazing diversity of projects that amount to a professional exhibition at the end of each semester.

Each studio is unique. For example, first year students might be designing an apartment to fit inside the head of the Statue of Liberty, while in the next studio third year landscape architecture students are master planning a town and its hinterland in the wheat belt and fifth year architecture students are shaping a museum in Milan. Whilst all studios must attain certain outcomes and accord with clear generic guidelines, each studio’s pedagogical method and intellectual emphasis differs.

The project(s) that constitute the brief for any given studio are carefully conceived by staff to inspire and challenge students, to apply aspects of contemporary design theory and to simulate and explore real world conditions. The design studio can also be turned toward a form of research where particular issues and design strategies are tested and the results peer reviewed, published and exhibited. Studios often involve real clients and real projects, conduits between the faculty and particular institutions or communities.

Studios involve fuzzy knowledge, speculation, trial and error, discourse and critique.

Much in design is factual and functional, but much is also radically subjective. Consequently, the studio is almost invariably a process based educational experience concerning how ideas take form and how they are represented and valued as hypothetical realities. The educational dynamic of the studio is that of a continual feedback loop between staff and students. The process is iterated primarily through the agency of drawings.

A messy combination of art and science, logic and intuition, the design process is more labyrinthine than linear. In that labyrinth there is always the risk of mystifying creativity, against which we, as design educators, frequently ask the following three questions. Firstly, to what degree can creative processes be taught as such? Secondly, how can the methods and outcomes of design be communicated as research within traditional research paradigms? And finally, upon what criteria is design valued and then accountably assessed? These questions are not mysteries but nor are they easily answered.

Rightly or wrongly, I tell my students that their ability to “do design” is not in their genes. Secondly, I suspect that rigorously testing design ideas is not that different to scientific methods. Finally, whilst recognizing that we are all subjectively situated, I believe that for our purposes there are some relatively objective criteria that can form the basis of accountable aesthetic judgment. In the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts our understanding and appreciation of these issues is constantly evolving through the design studio experience.