Abstract:

The City Space Investigations are explorations into new ways of teaching testing ICT in their practicability to ease workflows and intensify learning experiences. Stimulated by personal experience three students of the Delft University of Technology launched a workshop series questioning established didactical systems to investigate the strategic potential of workshops for educational purposes.

From its inauguration the CSI workshop series was conceived as an incrementally growing operation based on a four years term: until 2011 yearly organized workshops will increase in scale and scope, better addressing the topic of education and change. The first workshop in New York (2008) has been realized with relative little resources and efforts. The primary focus has been to test participatory approaches as opposed to classical power structures (teachers teach – students learn). The results however were ambivalent. On the one side the organization was pleased by the ‘psychological profile’ of the participants (pro-active), their commitment and the delivered results, on the other hand this success required more active stimulations as anticipated. Students were lost in the freedom given to them and looked for hierarchies to frame their ideas. After analysing the CSI.NY outcomes the organization decided to reduce the liberty for the sake of the learning experience.
The CSI.SP focused on workflow optimization and reduced the freedom of choice by given the workshop more direction in terms of theoretical underpinning and methodology while following a free-fold structure (preparation – on-site and post-production). A web-frame has been created to bridge geographical distance during preparation phase. On-site, the same web-frame provides the meta-structure to organize and fine-tune processes. During the two weeks in Sao Paulo participants work in groups on different areas within the city. Although a central physical space is provided, the strong fieldwork focus requires flexibility in schedule and attendance of group moments. Lectures (slides plus audio) and crucial updates will be put online within the same day to allow everyone to be up-to-date at any time while the students are requested to maintain individual and group blogs (structured in depth). These diaries can also be followed spatially as data-loggers are used to trace displacements in the city. At the end of the two weeks of work in the favelas of the city groups will present their projects and need to delve into representation matters to find appropriate balance between online information and physical products (sketches, models, plans etc.)

The envisioned long paper will focus on the practical experience gained within the workshop and attempts to link expectations and outcome to educational theory. Central to the paper will be the question of ICT as a tool. The authors will address positive and negative aspects encountered within the three phase: the problems within the introduction phase (all participants were unfamiliar with blogging and GPS-tracking); the bottlenecks in the workflow during the on-site workshop and the frictions in representation of ICT vs. traditional media. On the positive side we hope to report on a broadening of personal horizons and an increase of flexible thinking in scale. A questionnaire will be distributed to all participants and evaluated after being back in the Netherlands to integrate a second view point to the author’s discourse.

Keywords:

e-learning, architectural education, workshop.