Abstract:

Being able to provide a comprehensive analysis of the complex nature of a design project and developing problem solving skills are important assets that each design student should develop through their design education. Higher design education curricula aims to provide a series of skills and information to students ranging from professional standards and technical details to problem-solving and teamwork. However, it is not always possible to fully achieve these educational goals as it is not easy to overcome the risk of a superficial understanding of disciplinary knowledge by students where teachers have a more active role in transferring knowledge while students are more passive as receivers of knowledge.

While facing these issues in design education Project- based learning (PBL) is considered a relatively more successful approach that addresses some of these problems. The PBL method of learning and teaching requires a new distribution of roles for both students and teachers. In this system students work more actively and be an active part of the projects, while teachers stay as guides to lead students to the right directions to think and work through the problem solving and project development phases.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the benefits of PBL in design education through a landscape architecture course where students work in teams and each team of students are given a project site to develop a landscape architecture project. In each project site students are responsible for defining the problems and potentials of the site. To make a detailed analysis students need to make site visits, meetings with users and stakeholders and learn their needs and requirements from the project. Students work on these project sites during one semester where eventually they propose a landscape architecture project and present it to potential users. In each step students proceed to the project in close relationship with both the instructor and users. In this course the role of the instructor is not solely the transfer of knowledge but also guidance through the different steps of the project and making necessary contacts with the participants of the project.

Through the experiences that are gained from this course, the paper highlights two important discussions. Firstly, rather than structuring the course based on only weekly lectures and fictional project sites, inclusion of an actual project and weekly assignments, students find a chance to actively apply the theoretical knowledge that is gained from this course and improve their problem solving and design skills. Secondly, participation of authentic users of project sites and getting their feedback at different steps of the project help students to make more realistic and down to earth project proposals on the contrary to fictional educational design projects where they have no limitations.

Keywords:

Project Based Learning, Design Education, Landscape Architecture Project.