This practice paper deals with the curriculum renewal of the Bachelor’s Bouwkunde program of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft. It focuses on design education as a form of CBL and its pedagogical fundamentals in particular. The paper describes the program and the intentions for curriculum renewal, followed by an explanation of the new learning objectives and assessment strategy. Finally, it touches upon the team development process and lessons learned so far.

Holistic learning objectives and a holistic assessment strategy were developed to foster the curriculum renewal objectives and accommodate the integrative nature of design, design thinking, and design education. The design program’s learning objectives are based on four strongly related skills that were further detailed for every course: position, knowledge, research, and communication. To do justice to the importance of coherence and interaction between these four different parts, design needs to be assessed holistically. At an abstract level, aspects that count for all spatial designs were formulated, no matter how different they appear in various design outcomes: coherence & meaning, correctness & elaboration, communication, and research. However, they are strongly connected and are hard to assess independently.

In the academic year 2024-2025, the renewed learning objectives and assessment strategy are used in education practice. We expect these will help to address the essence of developing and assessing (design) proposals to intervene in complex systems. Its use will be actively monitored, and the outcomes will be used to improve next year’s curriculum. ... Read more

This thesis proposes a framework to address the design process in design education. Building upon the assumption that teachers, being professional designers, do not discuss the design process in the architectural design studio and do not have a vocabulary to do so, five generic elements or anchor points are defined which represent the basic design skills. The validity of the framework and the assumption is tested respectively in interviews with a variety of designers and in observations of dialogues between teachers and students. In the final test the design process is addressed in the design studio: the first experiences show that students’ understanding and self-efficacy may increase.
The five elements enable teachers and students to address the designerly attitude. The way designers reason consist of: (1) experimentation; an experimentation-based way of thinking; how to explore and reflect, (2) the frame of reference; a knowledge-based way of thinking; how to work with common and proven ‘professional’ knowledge, and (3) the guiding theme; a value-based way of thinking; how to take a position in the design process. Next to that, (4) the laboratory is the (visual) language or set of means designers use to think designerly, and (5) the domains are the playing field of the designer, the product aspects s/he should address. ... Read more

The aim of design education is that students learn to think and act like designers. However, the focus in the design studio is mainly on the design product, whereas the ‘why and how’ of the design process are barely addressed. A risk of learning by performing real-life tasks without addressing the skills involved, that is, without receiving appropriate support and guidance, is that learners are overwhelmed by the complexity of the tasks.
To make the design process explicit, a conceptual framework is developed in earlier research. This paper reports a first evaluation how articulation of basic designerly1 skills with the help of a conceptual tool is perceived by students and teachers and whether it changes students’ conceptions of the design process and their self-efficacy.
In two exploratory case studies, questionnaires give insight. The first is a short intervention in which student’s perception is measured. In the second case study the design process was addressed in the design studio. It measured changes in student’s conceptions and self- efficacy. Also, insight is provided in teacher’s perception of working with the framework.
The results of these exploratory studies indicate a positive effect. The teachers involved perceived the framework as a structuring factor during the tutoring sessions, for both teacher and students. Students did perceive explanation of the design process as being helpful. A change in students’ design conceptions and an increase in self-efficacy is seen.
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Historical investigation anchors architectural and urban practice. Analyzing two sets of questionnaires distributed in different class settings, this paper explores two questions: how do design students currently learn about architectural history, and how do they translate this knowledge into their design practice? First, tentative conclusions are that (1) physical engagement with buildings outside the classroom is an important inspiration for the students, (2) (assigned) books definitely influence their (design) thinking, (3) different types of pedagogy–lecture, seminar, thesis, studio–affect student learning in different and complementary ways, and (4) students overwhelmingly see history as a relevant preparation and foundation for design, but this understanding is implicit and often unspecific. ... Read more

The purpose of the architectural design studio is that students learn to think and act like designers. However, communication between teachers and students seems to be problem- atic. Teachers barely seem to explain how designers work, which may be confusing for stu- dents. To learn professional reasoning processes and strategies, different teaching activi- ties are involved, such as modelling, coaching, scaffolding, reflection, exploration and artic- ulation. In the design studio it seems tradition that teachers only ask questions, while not articulating the design process.
This paper focuses on the research question of whether teachers in architectural design education articulate the main ‘designerly’ actions and skills, performed by expert design- ers, and if so, to what extent and in which manner? To answer these questions video-re- cordings of 13 tutorial sessions are analysed with the help of an educational framework of five generic elements. The framework consists of the basic design process actions and skills, and is specifically developed as a vocabulary for making the design process explicit and to train students in the design process elements. The main conclusion is that teachers refer to the design product in an implicit way. They leave it to the students to discover the structure and components of the design process more or less by themselves. ... Read more

In this article we evaluate the manner in which we at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at the Delft University of Technology encourage the development of the capacity of reflection among our undergraduate students. First we explore the concept of reflection in relation to respectively experiential/reflective learning, reflection in/on action, reflection in higher education and reflection in design education. Next we describe our research object, our Bachelor course in Academic Design Reflection. Two research questions are at hand: (1) does the level of reflection increase during our course and (2) Can the operationalisation in our questionnaire of the definitions of reflection derived from theory statistically be confirmed? We measured and processed statistically the level of reflection of 100 students in 3 of their papers on their design. Results show there is a significant slight increase of this level among the three papers. Results also show that our model of classification is not statistically confirmed in the data. We conclude with a discussion on the implications for further research and for design education. ... Read more

A fascinating and rich landscape of personal views and approaches can be seen in architectural design and in architectural design education. This variation may be confusing for students. This paper focuses on the question: is the framework of generic elements that we developed for explicating the design process helpful to compare the differences in architectural design approaches? The results of interviewing a variety of 15 architectural, urban and landscape designers show all kinds of personal approaches that have a set of five underlying generic elements in common. Therefore, the framework may be helpful for teachers and students to describe these personal approaches and may help students in understanding differences and similarities and in finding out what their own personal approach may be. ... Read more