Design studios form an integral part of architectural education as spaces for making. However, starting with a design is daunting, and students must grapple with the first steps of generating a design response. This is further exacerbated by digital tools, such as Computer-Aided Drafting (CAD) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), where incorporating context and considering scale and creativity are disregarded. Therefore, a hands-on design approach is required. In the Master of Architecture program at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST), the studio is seen as a laboratory that tests various design strategies. Through a design research approach, students are guided to identify a theme or topic, understand context, investigate site strategies, and further develop these ideas into morphology. In this study, these methods are explored as design tools to define the process through analog artistic responses. An analog approach is deemed important to understand scale, connect the hand and body with place, and actively become part of the process of making. This is a direct counteraction to AI, in which the student remains the main actor. Ideas could be further developed with AI tools; however, students remained the main generators of content. Through this response, the hand is considered a tool, thus becoming the “thinking hand.” In a changing educational environment, the relevance of these methods in contrast to (and conjunction with) AI needs to be considered to further develop architecture design studios.
Madelein Stoffberg (Wed,) studied this question.