Experimenting with the Design Studio Format by Devising Encounters in Multiple Learning Environments

Abstract

This study investigates the proliferation of learning environments in a hybrid educational format as applied to an undergraduate urban planning design studio course in collaboration with Professor Nelly Marda at the National Technical University of Athens’ School of Architecture. The educational setting involved interaction in-class, online and in-situ. The objective was to increase the number and the quality of encounters between all the agents involved in the process: learners with teachers; learners with learners; learners with content; learners with topos.
This particular setup sought to bring together the face-to-face and the online components as complementary to one another in a symbiotic relationship. Hence, online features were integrated
as tools to the knowledge formation process within the existing framework of the design studio. At the same time, the course redesign accommodated activities that occurred within the site with the aim to relate the students with one another and with the place by performing a series of acts of sensory and bodily
cognition.
Through the diverse ways of entanglement students were invited in a continuous dialogue between tacit and explicit knowledge, while the hybrid educational setting that was created combined the physical and the digital in an interchanging relationship. Each component stimulated the knowledge creation process from a different perspective, but it also helped to establish multiple channels for communicating and amplifying this knowledge among teachers and students.