Today I made my last teaching visit to Edinburgh for the term. I will go back once more in the spring time to evaluate the work that I have been involved in, and then will be it for my current tenure as a RAE-sponsored teaching fellow; however, there is scope to extend the funding, and we help to do so for another year.
In today’s session students were half-way through a five-week design project, and were being asked to evaluate each other’s work using a multi-constraint analysis (see my post on the Workshed blog about why I think this is a handy approach).
The stage that these students are at now in their design projects is exactly the same as when I went up to an initial assessment of the design course, and I think that there are signs that the new elements that we brought in to the early part of the design course are having their impact. We’ll get a clearer idea when we conduct an evaluation in the springtime.
Part of my work with Martin Gillie and Tim Stratford at Edinburgh has been to create a suite of three design projects that enable students to have several goes at responding to a design brief before being faced with their five-week design course. These briefing packs have been given the ‘Expedition Workshed’ treatment: illustrated using images from a real project and co-written with a design engineer to add an extra dose of realism and appropriate information. The first of these briefing packs, based on the Emirates Airline project is now online.
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