Experiential Learning and the Co-creation of Design Artifacts

Abstract

This article examines the experience of a hybrid design studio tailored for beginning students in urban planning. The course combined elements of architectural design studio and planning workshop to advance design literacy, spatial awareness, procedural knowledge, and phenomenological experience. Teams of students undertook staggered weekly sequences of reading, critique, and design assignments focused on physical models of study neighborhoods. Through content analysis of student work, documentary film footage, and postgraduation surveys, I examine the merits of the hybrid studio. The co-creation of a model, which was an iterative and dialogically tested design artifact, heightened experiential learning of urban design.

Keywords

urban design citizen participation pedagogy hybrid studio experiential learning design artifact urban form

Teaching urban design to planning students poses a dual pedagogical challenge. First, there is neither sufficient time in a typical two-year program, nor curricular room to nurture a gradual development of spatial thinking with the requisite graphic presentation skills. Architecture and landscape architecture programs dedicate more than two thousand hours and an incremental layering of complexity to enable creativity and imagination to blossom alongside spatial thinking and critical reflection. Planning programs do not have this opportunity, nor should they. Planning necessarily requires the development of a broader set of literacies (Sandercock 1998) and planning students are typically charged with being facilitators rather than leaders of design (Sanoff 2000). Even with this different expectation, however, planners can benefit from sufficient facility with spatial understanding to be able to communicate with design professionals about the implications of design decisions and proposals.

Second, urban design at the neighborhood and city scales is spatially and temporally fragmented and subject to an ever-evolving set of political, economic, social, environmental, and technological forces. Design for planners, or urban design, therefore has a pedagogical mission distinct from design for architects and landscape architects. Urban design is most often an incremental, piecemeal and discontinuous amalgamation of designs that, at best, only partially respond to one another (Hall 1997). How theory interfaces with practice in the contested political economy of local communities is a difficult process to re-create in a studio setting. While planners must generally contend with multiscalar relationships in both the socioeconomic and biophysical spheres, architects and landscape architects tend to focus on the latter sphere. This article begins with the understanding that teaching urban design to planners is procedurally different, by intention because of planning’s stronger emphasis on socioeconomic contexts, and by necessity because of design’s smaller role in accredited planning curricula, from teaching urban design to architects and landscape architects.

This article explores the idea that a hybrid pedagogical environment can address the demand for basic design knowledge in crowded planning curricula, and caters to students with limited design experience and no opportunity to take a series of design courses including studio. In this case the hybridity comes from combining the planning workshop with the design studio. I acknowledge that urban design teaching, even for planners, sometimes occurs in a traditional master–apprentice studio setting (Tucker and Reynolds 2006) when the curriculum supports it. This article is most relevant for planning students outside of these dedicated urban design programs and those who do not take a series of urban design studio courses. I begin by drawing on a literature review to highlight the relative merits of each type of course and discuss how their combination might be an advantage in achieving learning objectives that are particularly relevant to planning students. I then introduce a hybrid course that I have designed and taught with slight variations five times in two different institutions. An analysis of the three most recent offerings of the course helps to answer the research question, What are the relative merits of a hybrid approach to design teaching for planners?

My argument here picks up a thread that Lang (1983) started, in promoting the studio learning environment as a critical piece of a comprehensive planning curriculum. I focus more explicitly on urban design teaching for a general planning student. Where Lang spoke mostly about studio teaching as a general pedagogical method for planning, I contrast the design studio as taught in architecture or landscape architecture programs with the planning workshop. In the planning literature, the term studio is often used to refer to small classes in which students take on “practical projects with workshop style classes and tutorials” (Higgins, Aitken-Rose, and Dixon 2009, 9; Lang 1983). In this article, I refer to this kind of class as planning workshop. The design studio in this article refers to typical architecture, landscape architecture, or urban design studios. The distinction is clarified in Table 1 and will be further clarified through the course of the article.

Table 1.

Summary of General Characteristics of the Planning Workshop and the Design Studio

	Planning Workshop	Design Studio
Typical learning objectives	Emphasis on team process; information sourcing including document and literature reviews, client discussions and field observations; problem scoping and problem analysis; analysis of potential solutions; articulation of recommendations; and written and verbal communication	Emphasis on strong and consistent conceptual design; cohesive and aesthetically compelling spatial design; efficient and functional space for the imagined experiences of ultimate users; feasible construction and systems performance; and the effective communication of design solutions
Nature of experiential learning	Typically through working iteratively with a community client or planning agency to produce a report and in some cases through directly contributing to community project plans and proposals	Typically through iterative experimentation with instructor and in some cases through design–build studios directly serving marginalized communities
Nature of social learning	Team-based learning with collaboration, negotiated agreement, and division of labor on every aspect of term project, whereby group learning is often a source of stress	Peer-based learning with observation and shared experience of high-stress public critiques, whereby group learning is both a source of competition stress and stress relief through commiseration
Student teacher interaction	Instructor addresses whole class and teams of students	Instructor addresses whole class and individual students
Typical class size	8-24	12-18
Client or client group	Tends to be real with community or agency representatives	Tends to be hypothetical with a detailed design brief
Problem source	Real problem with real constituency and real project and imminent decisions or actions	Real problem with hypothetical constituency, or real constituency and hypothetical project
Problem scope	Physical scope varies, always includes social and economic factors	Fixed physical boundary with emphasis on physical change
Analytical rigor	High and draws on considerable data	Low with basic case research at the outset
Site analysis	Weak and tends toward social and economic parameters	Strong and tends toward physical, ecological and climatic parameters
Main driver of inquiry	Data gathering, stakeholder identification	Abstract conceptualization, reflection and iterative experimentation
Product	Report including problem statement, development of options, alternatives, or scenarios, analysis and recommendations	Posters with compelling graphics including brief text, concept diagrams, and 2-D and 3-D visualizations of design proposals
Final output	Report and presentation to client and/or community group	Presentation to peers and professional jury
General pros	Interdisciplinary and inclusive, often representing a collective vision	Visionary, tangible, and visualizes a future that can be a source of inspiration
General cons	Compromise diluted solutions with no clear course of action	Idiosyncratic with personal self-referential vision

Any attempt to define, categorize, and distinguish between the planning workshop and the design studio is bound to be flawed. The distinction is more of a continuum than a dichotomy, with many planning workshops functioning and producing outputs very much like design studios and vice versa. While fully acknowledging that there may be considerable overlap between the two types of learning, it is important to note key pedagogical differences between the essential types. For the purposes of this article, I will characterize the planning workshop as tending to be practical, problem-based, and experiential and include community service learning. The design studio tends to be constructivist, immersive, and iterative and include considerable individual instruction.

Pedagogical Hybridity: From Constructivist, Peer-Based, and Social Learning to Experiential, Team-Based Communities of Practice

A vast literature covering multiple theories of learning can be brought to bear on the issue of studio and workshop teaching. The most direct connection to studio teaching is of course the literature that discusses design teaching and links between design and broader learning theories. Shön’s work on the reflective practitioner stands out in this area. For the planning workshop, scholarship has focused on the importance and benefits of a studio-style learning environment (Higgins, Aitken-Rose, and Dixon 2009; Lang 1983) and the experiences of community service learning in planning workshops (Senbel 2009a, 2009b; Hardin, Eribes, and Poster 2006; Kotval 2003). Other relevant approaches to studio teaching are problem-based learning, student-centered learning, and peer-based learning. Constructivist, experiential, and social learning theories emerge as particularly relevant. Each theory is progressive in terms of recognizing the importance of the individual experience of the student and the benefit of allowing each student’s unique life experience to guide her or his acquisition and cultivation of knowledge. All seem relevant to a critical analysis of an applied learning environment in planning. I begin by reviewing the literature on design as it relates to studio teaching and then outline some of the main features of those theories of learning that are relevant to both studio teaching and planning workshops.

Scholars generally focus on showcasing exploratory approaches to design teaching and on the application of pedagogical models to studio teaching. Schön (1984) documents the process of learning about design by analyzing interactions between instructors and students in studio desk critiques. The beginning design student is placed in the studio setting with no prior design or studio experience and learns the process and expectations of studio learning through continual dialogue with the studio instructor. The student observes hands-on conceptual experiments by the instructor in the form of sketched design solutions. Throughout the interactions between instructors and students, the students develop a language of design through which they learn to communicate their design ideas. Schön refers to the give-and-take of dialogue and sketching as translating knowledge (personal experience) and feedback (from the instructor) into action (design idea). In Schön’s model, the instructor and student are reflecting on an existing design idea or question through the abstract conceptualization of potential design solutions with on-the-spot drawing experiments. These steps are iterative and integrated and often difficult to distinguish and together amount to moments of learning and design intelligence (Schön 1984).

Constructivist and experiential theories of learning are especially relevant to studio teaching. They have their roots in the pragmatism of education through discovery and personal experience first articulated by John Dewey (1938). Constructivist learning theory emphasizes how mental structures are developed through student interactions with the environment of learning (Savery and Duffy 1996). Learning activities are structured to prompt connections to the experiences and knowledge of the students. In this way, knowledge is constructed into something more meaningful at a personal level (Walker 2002). Constructivist learning theory contends that when learning is shaped within social activity such as peer or team-based learning, the student comes away with enhanced understanding because of engagement with others (Savery and Duffy 1996; Walker 2002) and knowledge of self in relation to others (Packer and Goicoechea 2000). In addition, constructivist learning can emphasize self-directed hands-on activities like drawing or model building as a means to develop knowledge through physical construction (Wenger 2009; Oxman 1999).

David Kolb’s experiential learning theory builds on the constructivist approach by defining learning as “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (Kolb 1984, 38). Kolb sees learning as a staged process with four distinct sequential stages: concrete experience occurs through tangible experiences with subsequent reflective observation of these experiences. Following the stages of experience and reflection, the learner is then able to comprehend and formulate abstract ideas through abstract conceptualization, which can then be applied to a new problem or activity through active experimentation (Kolb 1984; Demirbas and Demirkan 2003). Critics of Kolb’s experiential learning model take issue with his separation of thinking and action in the learning cycle (Elkjaer 2009). Unlike Schön’s integrated learning moments, for example, Kolb separates the thinking tasks of reflection and observation, from the action task of experimentation.

Constructivists posit that generative learning occurs through collaborative and cooperative learning and problem solving (Dunlap and Grabinger 1996). For them, experiential learning fails to make explicit the social aspects of learning in which dialogue and collaboration could facilitate deeper reflection and engagement (Jarvis 2009). Building on Piaget’s (1972) constructivist perspective on peer learning, O’Donnell and King (1999) describe a process where knowledge is acquired through social activity; a conceptualization that is highly applicable to the studio environment. The Piagetian approach to peer learning finds value in students learning from others whose abilities are more advanced, the same, or less advanced. These peer interactions enable students to develop new meanings through a fuller context of learning with others (O’Donnell and King 1999).

An important distinction between the planning workshop and the design studio is the manner in which they engage real-world problems. Both constructivist and experiential learning theories converge in their emphasis on structuring learning outcomes around real-world problems that allow teaching and learning to occur through direct experience (Billig and Eyler 2003; Sanoff 2007; Nagel 1996). Utilizing real-world issues as problem-solving activities provides a context for learning that enables knowledge to become generative and fused. As a result, this knowledge comes alive and becomes directly applicable to real-life situations (Nagel 1996). The difference between the approaches is that where constructivist theory might accept simulations of real-world problems to trigger curiosity, interest and engaged learning, experiential theory would demand that students access those real-world problems by being situated in real-world environments. Deliberate reflection on their experiences in the context of broader readings and theories is used to accelerate and deepen their learning.

In planning programs, real-world problem solving is a common occurrence in many service-learning courses, community-based design studios, capstone practicums, and paid internships (Grant and Manuel 1995; Kotval 2003; Freestone, Thompson, and Williams 2006; Rios 2005; Sanoff 2007). These classes are not without their challenges. Setting up new courses and programs, ensuring that programs balance the benefits and burdens on recipient communities, and managing the politics of service learning partnerships can all be difficult (Kahne and Westheimer 1996; Markus, Howard, and King 1993; Billig and Eyler 2003; Sanoff 2007). Despite their challenges, the community engagement learning opportunities of working on real projects with real protagonists make community-based teaching an essential component of planning curricula. Community-based learning is not exclusive to planning. Henry Sanoff (2007) describes three decades of work in a design studio in which students worked directly with community groups to produce designs and plans. Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio required students to design and build homes for very-low-income people in what was clearly experiential learning with real-world projects. While many universities now offer their students similar design-build learning experiences, this type of learning is far from mainstream. Mockbee himself saw his work as an exception when he said, “the way studio is taught today in the all the major universities, those are all theoretical projects, they are not realistically based” (SamuelMockbee.net 2011).

Here we see an important common distinction between the design studio and the planning workshop. The workshop prioritizes the real-world context for providing students with the experience of engaging directly with a real community and managing a process of balancing complex and competing interests (Forsyth, Lu, and Mcgirr 2000; Higgins, Aitken-Rose, and Dixon 2009). The design studio, on the other hand, prioritizes the students’ own craft and process of managing complex functional, structural, aesthetic, and phenomenological requirements through a combination of evolving professional judgment and anticipation of user needs (Schön 1984).

Whether serving a real or hypothetical project, problem-based learning is at the heart of design pedagogy (Shepherd and Cosgrif 1998; Kuhn 2001). Design studio pedagogy is based on a problem or project approach to learning outcomes (Ledewitz 1985; Dutton 1987; Salama and Wilkinson 2007). Perhaps it is because problem-based learning is so integral to design teaching with its tradition of a design brief and a real site and explicit constraints that the literature does not dwell on this aspect of design pedagogy. The same is true for planning workshops with their focus on real problems with real clients and communities. Instead, there is considerably more scholarship on peer or team-based learning. This literature focuses on the successes and challenges of peer learning through discussions of how instructors may effectively use peer or team-based learning (Grant and Manuel 1995; Kotval 2003; O’Donnell and King 1999). Peer-based pedagogy employs a peer-resource model, whereby students in different stages in a degree program are placed together in interyear groups or a vertical studio. Senior or more experienced students add a broader learning resource than the instructor alone. Grant and Manuel (1995) showed that the peer resource model empowered and gave confidence to students. Peer learning has also been shown to provide a buffer for anxiety when students are faced with new learning environments and unfamiliar activities. This peer support network can enable a higher achievement level for individuals working in groups than for individuals working alone (Dunlap and Grabinger 1996).

Students benefit from problem solving in teams, particularly if different or conflicting solutions emerge during the problem-solving process. When faced with conflicting solutions, student performance can improve because they have been presented and have had to contend with differing perspectives; this too broadens the students’ knowledge and experience (O’Donnell and King 1999). Team-based learning helps students learn to collaborate, create a sense of belonging, develop critical thinking, and institute a feeling of accountability (Michaelson, Knight, and Fink 2002; Walker 2002; Savery and Duffy 1996; Dunlap and Grabinger 1996). This team approach to teaching is much more prevalent in the planning workshop than in the design studio.

Shaffer (2007) reflected on a host of learning opportunities in an architecture studio to show that “social interactions became a pedagogy” (Shaffer 2007, 121). In the design studio, social learning occurs in conversations between students in the studio space in the context of observing one another produce the work and present it and defend it. It is social learning through dialogue and a mutual experience. In the planning workshop, social learning occurs mainly through team work. Students have to negotiate everything from the conceptualization to the execution of their joint projects while simultaneously balancing academic learning objectives with community or client needs. The planning workshop is a direct experience in a horizontal team structure, with all its challenges, with limited time and resources.

While peer learning in the design studio might reduce stress, team-based learning in the planning workshop might increase it as students expend time and energy navigating differences and negotiating design decisions. In the studio students bond over common struggles and challenges in an immersive environment that occupies most of their time during the semester. Competition in the studio is somewhat mitigated by virtue of the uniqueness of each student’s design solution. Conversation therefore tends to be convivial and occurs during breaks from individual work. By contrast, dialogue in the team environment of the planning workshop is work. Even though the social environment of the design studio is clearly different from the planning workshop, in both cases, social learning can facilitate self-awareness, identity formation, and ultimately, learning (Wenger 2000).

Communities of practice theories of learning, which build on social learning theories, have the potential to both explain empirical phenomena and to challenge planning educators and students to push the boundaries of learning. They conceptualize learners as being members of a community with both a common ground and a mechanism of collaboratively building on this common ground to create new knowledge (Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder 2002). The notion of artifacts in communities of practice theory offers another distinction between the workshop and the studio. Artifacts can be tools, documents, or models, and in the case of “architectural blueprints [artifacts] play a crucial role in connecting multiple practices (. . . architects/contractors/city planners)” (Wenger 2000, 236). Each pedagogical environment emphasizes different learning objectives associated with this collectively created artifact. For example, Wenger suggests that communities of practice must strike a balance between core processes that enable deep learning in a specific area (like the focus on individual technical development in the design studio for example), and systemwide processes of knowledge production (like the emphasis on multiple interests and varied sources of information in the planning workshop) (Wenger 2000). A hybrid teaching approach might therefore seek to balance between core and systemwide processes of knowledge or at least be explicit about the tradeoffs between the two.

We can conclude that both the design studio and the planning workshop encompass the major aspects of constructivist and experiential learning. They also provide rich opportunities for peer and team learning. Social learning is particularly well served in both learning environments. Communities of practice theories suggest that a core–boundary balance might be achieved through a combination of the studio and workshop models of learning. A triad of interrelated pedagogical principles emerge as instrumental for both directing and analyzing design studios for planning students: (1) student learning is enriched by active engagement in real problems and that real projects make the learning all the more vivid, engaging, and lasting; (2) environments that facilitate peer interactions facilitate individual learning, and team-based learning provides a host of opportunities for professional practice; and (3) social learning that embeds students in the professional context in which they will be working creates communities of practice.

Examining the Hybrid Design Studio

In this article, I reflect on a course that I taught five times in two different institutions since 2005. While in some instances I reflect on my overall experience in both institutions, the bulk of my analysis refers to the last three instances of the course taught exclusively to students in a single two-year accredited graduate planning program at the University of British Columbia. There was generally an even distribution of first- and second-year students in the class. Students who took the course had a wide range of undergraduate degrees and had little or no experience with any form of design of graphic communication. However, each year, two or three students typically had some design experience and were part of the urban design concentration of the program. A handful of graduate students from architecture, landscape architecture, fine arts, resource management, and journalism also took the course as an elective. The curricular goal was to provide planning students with an introductory urban design course that could either stand alone or be a seed for subsequent learning in more advanced urban design offerings.

The course, which I will refer to as the hybrid design studio (HDS), was deliberately designed to provide a phenomenological pedagogy that would, according to Mohaly-Nagy, “help shorten the road to self-experience” (Findeli 1990, 9). This “shortened road” was a key objective in my attempt to create a brief yet meaningful urban design experience for planning students. I set out to create a course that would (1) provide condensed design knowledge for planning students, (2) make the act of designing more accessible to nondesigners, (3) simulate the immersive studio environments that characterize the design professions, and (4) create an engaging problem context that enables interdisciplinary learning.

The following briefly elaborates on the course learning objectives.

Design literacy and knowledge of design metrics

Knowledge of the issues, priorities, indicators, and measurements that are typically used in urban design discourse. These would include density, compactness, walkability, zoning, floor–area ratios, set-backs, height limits, parking requirements, proximity to transit, and proximity to park space etc.

Spatial awareness and formal rationality

Understanding of context, scale, massing, adjacency, axis, perspective, and materiality.

Capacity to visualize three-dimensional space and understand the kinds of spatial relationships that contribute to healthy, vibrant, safe, and economically viable urban spaces.

Procedural knowledge

Knowledge of the formal process of development including parcel assembly or division, rezoning, development application, and public consultation.

Firsthand experience with the organic nature of urban development, whereby piecemeal, opportunistic, speculative, and reactive development takes place in an incremental ad hoc implementation of a fluid vision.

Dialogical experience in the negotiation of design solutions within teams and across teams as expressed through different roles in the urban design process.

Phenomenological awareness

Becoming aware of the lived experience of city dwellers. Through observation, conversation, and discussions of urban design issues and proposals, students would gain insight into the hopes, fears, and aspirations of area residents.

As a graduate of separate professional architecture and planning programs, and having practiced professionally in each discipline, I have a deep appreciation for the qualities of each discipline and the learning environments that contribute to each. I therefore deliberately set out to construct a hybrid approach to urban design teaching that would draw from the best qualities of each pedagogical tradition and would be particularly well suited to planners. Here I cast a reflective and analytical gaze at this hybrid course and ask: What are the relative merits of a hybrid approach to design teaching for planners?

Unlike conventional design studios, HDS deliberately emphasized peer reflection over desk-critiques. It required an explicit engagement of urban design readings through student presentations, and included problem-based learning assignments. In designing this course, I was initially inspired by Alexander and his coauthors in A New Theory of Urban Design (Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein 1987) in which they explore the notion of incremental holistic design through an experiment of sequential student manipulations of a physical model. Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein’s experiment was a thirty-acre stretch along the San Francisco waterfront but their principles of coherent piecemeal growth, the growth of larger wholes, positive urban space, and the formation of centers transcend scale and location. Each student had a turn at making design changes in the form of a development project that then became part of the new context for subsequent designs.

Each of the three HDS courses discussed in this article focused on a different neighborhood with a different community or client group. I will refer to them as inner city heritage, community visioning, and imminent densification (see Table 2). The partnerships and urban design issues in each of the projects were as follows:

Table 2.

Summary of Course Outcomes for Each Project

	Course 1 Imminent Densification	Course 2 Neighborhood Visioning	Course 3 Inner City Heritage
Client	Ad hoc group of residents	Planning board of nonprofit organization	Group of leaders from a number of different organizations
Partners	City but they retreated part way for political reasons	None	None
Design charge	Maximum publically acceptable density around new transit hub	Pioneering vision for the neighborhood that addresses changing demographics	Heritage conservation that attracts youth and retains socioeconomic diversity
Demographic characteristics	Low-income transitional immigrant recipient area and majority ESL	Mixed income including low to middle income with high aboriginal population	Very low income adjacent to lowest income in the city with professionals in the gentrified fringe
Physical characteristics	Steep terrain with mostly single family, a school and some retail on one side of an arterial and light to heavy industrial on the other side of the arterial	Single-family homes and low-rise apartment buildings around commercial corridor. Community centre with more than 30 acres of open space	Low-rise heritage buildings lining commercial streets with single-room occupancy hotels to the north and new condos to the south
Students	22, all planning	21 total, 1 journalism, 1 visual arts, 1 resource management	29 total, 1 landscape architecture, 1 architecture
Product	Model and book	Model and website	Model and book
Outcome	Sporadic communication between instructor and community representatives	Successful capital plan submission to the city for a facilities upgrade to the community complex	Client group pursued a financial feasibility report for different ideas for the neighborhood
Client satisfaction	Moderate (client group was amorphous)	High (vision was seen as desirable and was pursued in client’s subsequent iterations)	Moderate to high (vision was seen as compelling but failed to capture the client’s ongoing interest)
Student satisfaction from 5-point scale course evaluations
Structure achieves objectives	4.73	4.86	4.71
Contribution to overall knowledge	4.73	4.79	4.71
Overall effectiveness	4.73	4.85	4.74
Student satisfaction gleaned from end-of-term discussions	Moderate to high	High	Moderate to high
Viability/realism	Low, city became distant for political reasons	Moderate, plans were an early catalyst for capital plan submission to the city	Moderate, client group sought consulting services from student group

Imminent densification began with a collaboration with a local planning department when planners suggested a neighborhood that was about to undergo major development around a recently completed rapid transit hub. They wanted us to help test out early engagement with area residents ahead of what was predicted to be a difficult public engagement process. The city ended up withdrawing because the process was getting contentious around the time of municipal elections.

Community visioning was a solicitation by a pioneering nonprofit community organization that coordinates and manages the joint activities of a community center, a high school, an elementary school, a seniors’ center, an aquatic center, and a skating rink. The client wanted assistance with public participation around community visioning that would lead to a capital plan submission to the city. The ultimate request for $22 million was submitted with the help of a small subset of the class and was eventually approved.

Inner city heritage was also instigated by a group of concerned leaders who feared the demise of the heritage character of an ethnic neighborhood in the face of encroaching development. The client group wanted help in imagining scenarios that would energize the district and attract youth who had long ago stopped visiting in favor of suburban malls. The work led to the city funding a small team of consultants, including students, to produce a detailed report.

In each case, the area of analysis was determined by radiating out from a central node with a 400-meter radius or 5-minute walking distance. Students were charged with building a 1:400 scale physical model of this area. This is the largest scale possible for building the study area while still being able to physically maneuver around and work on the model. Coincidentally Alexander used a scale of 1″ = 32′ (equivalent to 1:384), in his class. In the HDS student teams took the first two weeks of the semester to build the existing buildings, roads, parks, and trees using museum board, cardboard, paper, and foam (see Figure 1). The constructed areas were approximately 140 acres (56 hectares) and the models measured approximately 8′ × 8′. Students remained in the same teams of 3 or 4 throughout the semester and each week two teams of students made design changes to the model to help explore the clients’ goals.

Figure 1.

The 1:400 scale model of 140 acres of the community visioning neighborhood

Designs that followed in subsequent weeks had to begin with the revisions already made to the model as the new reality from which they had to work. Students could not demolish anything that had not been on the model for at least two weeks. There was no opportunity to revise or refine a design except through subsequent changes by other groups, or by the same group three cycles of design later. Students only had one week to conceive of, develop, and construct their buildings, roadways, paths, and open spaces and once built, their design became part of the simulated neighborhood. We thus mimicked the process of incremental growth in the city.

The class met twice per week with two parallel streams of activity: discussions of theory through readings, and presentations and critiques of team designs. The first session of the week focused on the physical model. The two design teams presented their changes to the model and were each critiqued by a different team of students. Both the design and critique teams had to submit written summaries of their presentations. In the second session of the week, a third pair of teams was charged with making presentations based on assigned urban design readings while integrating their own experiences of living, working, and traveling in different kinds of urban environments. Students were encouraged to share photos and stories that linked their lived experience to different types of urban form. The weekly sequence of activities went from designing to reading to critiquing to designing, with the cycle repeating itself three times (see Figure 2). In addition to extracting design ideas and normative positions from urban design readings (e.g., Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs, William Whyte, Peter Calthorpe, and Jan Gehl) students heard directly from members of the community and professional planners engaged in neighborhood planning in the study area community. Through the community members’ participation, students heard of the struggles, fears, hopes, and aspirations of local residents. Through the planners’ participation, students learned of both the city’s own objectives of maximizing public benefit and the challenges it faced in overcoming local opposition to its plans. Students were additionally exposed to a multitude of other sources including informal conversations with residents while studying the area, and articles and programs in popular media.

Figure 2.

The workflow of the HDS showing the weekly staggering of team assignments

Findings

To assess the relationship between the hybrid structure of the course and achieving my stated beginning urban design learning objectives I relied on numerous sources of data. In addition to the standard course evaluations, in one of the courses students completed an anonymous and voluntary questionnaire after their completion of all course requirements. They were asked questions about the content and experience of the course. All questions were open-ended and students could write as much as they wished. Out of twenty-two students in the class, nineteen completed this survey with one student absent on the day the survey was administered. Students were also surveyed two years after the completion of that course, at which time ten students completed a web-based open-ended questionnaire. All but one student from the course had graduated. Students had the option of anonymity and two of the ten chose to remain anonymous. In addition to the model, students produced a book of photographs, drawings, and text to summarize the progression of work in each course. All these data sources were reviewed as part of this analysis. Finally, one of the students attending the course produced a documentary film using interviews with classmates and video footage of student team meetings and class discussions. The film was edited and completed in the semester after the imminent densification studio. Some of the materials used in creating the film were transcribed and used for the purpose of this research.

I categorized and analyzed the textual data through the theoretical lens of pedagogical hybridity that distinguishes between the design studio and the planning workshop and applied it to each of the learning objectives to reveal two things: (1) evidence of achievement of the objectives, and (2) the relationship between the structure of the course and the attainment of objectives. Table 2 provides a summary of each of the course outcomes. As Table 2 demonstrates, there was considerable contextual variation between the three courses. The relationship with the client, as evidenced through the outcomes and client satisfaction was also different across the courses. While the remainder of the article dwells on the common student experience across all three iterations of the course, it is worth noting here that the second course achieved the best results for both the students and the client. What does not appear in Table 2 is that the client group in that second neighborhood visioning course was the most cohesive as a group and the most engaged and committed to communicating with the students about their work.

Because the theoretical constructs of experiential and constructivist learning are so focused on the experience of the student, I chose to relay their direct voices to the greatest extent possible in presenting the results of the research. All quotes in the sections that follow are the words of students who took the HDS and are identified by the survey instrument through which the quote was obtained. Quotes have been included only if they are representative of a recurring theme and are consistent with at least three other quotes with similar or identical content. Quotes are attributed to one of the following: course evaluation (CE), postcourse evaluation (PCS), postgraduation survey (PGS), and transcripts from the documentary film (DF).

Design Literacy and Knowledge of Design Metrics

Design literacy was achieved primarily through the students’ presentation and justification of their proposed design. The acquisition of design language occurred through the application of readings to design changes, and over time through the design critique process, as each team presented a design or critiqued another team’s design. That formal dialogue of presentation and critique created a collaboratively derived discourse on design. As one student put it, “an effort to incorporate the language and terminology of urban design took place during the critique/design presentation as well as in the written work” (PCS). The critique process contributed to a reflective voice as promoted by Kolb (1984) and Wenger (2000) but also for design language development as described by Schön (1984). There were numerous statements about students gaining the capacity to critique in ways that sharpened their design thinking.

The peer critiques provided for a fresh outside perspective, or sober second thought, that required us to really justify and explain some of our designs. (PGS)

For me a lot of learning about design concepts and theories took place during the critiques. It was interesting (and sometimes surprising) to hear different perspectives on the same design. Knowing that we would be critiqued, as well as [thinking about] past critiques, helped me to consider possible criticisms throughout my own design process. (PGS)

The cycle of design and critique set forth in the HDS seemed consistent with Schön’s theory of reflection-in-action. Although in the case of the HDS the social context of learning is primarily team based rather than one-on-one with the instructor as Schön observed, his process of reflection-in-action is evident in student questionnaire responses.

I think that this course pushed us to taking ideas and concepts and seeing them in action (even though they were on a model). . . . I have also developed a better understanding of how to articulate my ideas about urban design. (PGS)

This class demanded us to put knowledge gained from the reading into practice in a real way. This is a major strength as it demands that you know the material. (CE)

A survey of the summaries of the weekly designs across all three courses reveals consistent reference to contemporary concerns in urban design such as compatibility of form, density, complete community, mixed use, vital streetscape, walkability, alternative transportation, urban agriculture, and stormwater management. Students also made consistent, albeit infrequent, reference to theoretical constructs from classic readings such as Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Allan Jacobs, and Peter Calthorpe in their summaries of their designs and critiques. None of the students responded that they were able to adequately connect their knowledge of urban design theories with the capacity to speak knowledgeably about urban design. Instead, they attributed their capacity to speak knowledgably about urban design to their confidence in interpreting and communicating spatial relationships that support prevailing popular discourse on walkable mixed-use transit oriented communities. The peer learning seemed to have been so strong and overriding that the collective knowledge of space and form generated in the class subsumed any theoretical underpinnings gained from the literature.

Spatial Awareness and Formal Rationality

Given that the medium for design expression in all three courses was the scale model of the neighborhood, it was the primary vehicle for spatial learning. The model seemed to facilitate an understanding of the spatial arrangement and connectivity of the neighborhood through the process of building and rebuilding it.

The model gave us a much deeper understanding of the existing neighborhood. We understood every house, sidewalk, and tree because we had to build them and place them in the appropriate location on the model. (PGS)

The model also provided a tangible way to develop spatial awareness, “The model provided an excellent 3-D learning tool for us to imagine how changing space also changes the community” (PCS). For some students, the experiential learning of model building was indistinguishable from real-world experience about “how small things (buildings, parcels etc.) interact and affect the larger area or city. The work with the model using an existing location really helped to put it all together” (PCS).

Another student similarly linked the model with the reality of the neighborhood that the model represented, “[the model] made me more aware of what the neighborhood entailed and the different components that exist in one small area. Also, it gave me a better sense of spacing and space allocation for different things” (PGS). My assessment of the general quality of individual design changes to the model suggests that they were elementary. Design teams almost always started off poorly selecting their ideas, poorly developing them, and executing them in ways that were, by professional standards, clumsy and inelegant. They often continued to do so in their second and third designs too, but every team took on increasingly more complex spatial configurations and improved with every new design. The overall quality was consistent with the students’ level of experience.

Focusing on the model as the object of analysis and the medium for creative exploration necessarily helped students to understand how urban objects are assembled from small pieces configured in specific ways. The development of design changes to the model relates to abstract conceptualization and active experimentation in Kolb’s experiential learning model. Student teams generated ideas from readings, class discussions, and their own personal experiences, to construct abstract ideas to consider in the development of their design interventions. The students then applied these ideas through active experimentation by building the newly formed “experiment” into the model. As one student put it, “I mainly learned how to go back and forth between the concept and the physical reality of these concepts. The interplay back and forth when building models really brings out where things need to be worked on” (PGS). The spatial literacy alluded to here is not one of simple volumetric synthesis but rather of connecting physical forms with conceptual ideas about urban functions. The model enabled students to experiment with the interplay between space and social policy. This is qualitatively different from the simple spatial literacy of understanding the nature of discrete and intersecting volumetric shapes, which was the original intent of this learning objective. The objective of spatial thinking was therefore realized in a different way because students were already thinking of the social implications of their proposed forms and did not have the opportunity to dwell on the spatial characteristics of geometric volumes alone.

Procedural Knowledge

Process knowledge

By focusing on the reality of the planning challenge for local residents and planners in imagining and discussing different solutions, the reality of community problems became more vivid and central to design explorations. Many students commented that when developing design interventions, they would recall the residents’ feelings and movements within the neighborhood. Additionally, the emphasis on incremental design as it might occur in the actual city context appears to be a critical factor in student learning. Interestingly, this process helped students look at their site through a spatial and temporal lens; as they produced designs for a particular place, they extended their understanding of its relevance and impact out in time to an unknown future. This process also forced students to look beyond their own site, to see how their proposals might impact the neighborhood as a whole.

Having a larger, broader view that goes beyond individual buildings/architecture and that considers the future needs of inhabitants as well as the current needs is a valuable addition to the development of cities—a temporal and spatial perspective. (PCS)

Understanding of the process of development varied across the three different projects. When development stakes were high, as in the case of imminent densification and inner city heritage, students were repeatedly exposed to the details of current and proposed development plans. These developments represented threats and opportunities that community residents, leaders, and planners spoke about at length. The specifics of rezoning applications, public hearing reactions, City responses, architect responses, public outcry, and plan revisions or no plan revisions became part of the narrative of the neighborhood that students had to design within. Evidence of this narrative showed up in the student designs and in the explicit mention of the competing interests.

Piecemeal experience

One team starts putting something on there, and you kind of think about it for your own design, and think about what you can do next. It’s good to bring those experiences together. . . . You’re always going to be learning and teaching when you’re working in that kind of environment. (DF)

The sequence of density increase was pretty profound. The first tower was always a surprise; then it just seemed normal after that, this probably is what happened in NYC when towers first came in. I know it is happening in parts of [other cities] now. (PGS)

A design intervention from week one was very different from week ten because of the imagined future the class created and the accumulation of our previous designs. (PGS)

The HDS instilled in the students an appreciation of the urban design process and an understanding of how particular design solutions are implemented over others. One student articulated this by writing, “I have a tendency to look at urban structure more than I did previously. I also add weight to the background process that occurred. When I see bad design, I understand that there may have been circumstances in the design process that led to compromise that may be reflected in the less than ideal design” (PGS). Another student wrote that building the model “really helps visualize the complexity of a community and how each of its individual parts have to work together to achieve the overall goal of building a sustainable, complete community” (PGS).

The evolution of the collaboratively produced design seemed to instill an understanding of the complexity of urban planning and urban design. The sequential nature of student interventions (a process intended to replicate real world incrementalism) in conjunction with actual design process (representing team problem solving) and the critique of the design (representing public process) caused students to reflect on the complexity of urban growth. This subsequently instilled in students the ability to consider urban form and urban design as milestones along a series of processes that only partially reflect civic aspirations.

Dialogical experience

Students and community members repeatedly talked about the model as a facilitator of dialogue about the neighborhood. The large physical presence of the object in the classroom and its utility as a reference tool, an ice breaker, a channel for imagined futures, a simplifier of complexity, and a work of craft and creativity were significant for both peer and experiential learning. The model helped the students negotiate their designs and helped them discuss the designs with area residents, planners, and leaders.

Building the model of the existing neighborhood provided an intensive opportunity for the teams to get to know one another prior to design work. As the course progressed to the design phase, working in teams allowed for a negotiated exploration of design ideas, which generated more ideas and a layered final product. A number of students attributed a higher quality of work as a result of working directly with other students in the same arena. Students were crafting and re-crafting the same object and were inspired by one another, “We fed off of each other’s ideas and developed more sophisticated and rigorous design interventions than we would have come up with individually” (PGS).

While the students did not speak to it directly, they clearly experienced what it is like to design in a participatory or collaborative way where negotiation and compromise might be necessary. They gained direct experience in realizing that a design idea changes considerably when subjected to other ideas, whether those ideas are complementary or contradictory. Students had to contend with this interchange of ideas within their teams but also more formally as part of the team critique process. Multiple learning outcomes arose from the critique process, but perhaps the most direct was a formalization of Piaget’s peer learning model. “The rounds of critiquing allowed me to see the different ways other people perceived the design issue at hand, which was very useful as I had no design background whatsoever” (PCS).

I think that the overall design and critique process really makes you take responsibility for coming up with workable ideas, solutions, options for development. When you present ideas in front of your classmates and face scrutiny, you really focus on both the details and the bigger picture. Without this critique, I don’t think we would have pushed our ideas as far as we did. In focusing so hard on the diversity of issues at play I developed a sense of the city with all its complexities: its interconnections, its details, the way people use different spaces, the way I feel in a space, the different stakeholder interests, etc. (PGS )

Through the painstaking process of designing changes to the model, students would go through a deeper analysis of ideas in anticipation of their peers’ critiques. Because team members knew their design intervention would be subjected to a public critique by students and the instructor, they would work hard to anticipate criticism and design accordingly. During the critique process, design teams often saw other ways of achieving the same goal or other similar goals that they may have overlooked. Always moving from critique to design, in the weekly sequence of assignments, students had a heightened sense of the critical voice that caused them to anticipate critiques. Students therefore did not only design to anticipate the instructor’s critiques but also the expectations of the entire class. There was a sense that this object, the model, was a shared creation whose details were tested and defended through dialogue and discussion and whose representations of form and community reflected the collective class discourse. The model became an artifact that was afforded increasing amounts of respect as the semester progressed.

Phenomenological Awareness

Students repeatedly spoke directly of the importance of designing for the “real world”. The majority of students felt that having the foundation of a real neighborhood on which they could apply an evolving vision informed by numerous influences was a critical learning opportunity. In conjunction with building the model, visiting the neighborhood and talking to residents and community leaders were key elements in the development of spatial awareness. Some students’ experiences would be replicable in any studio with a real site, “I was much more engaged due to the real nature of the project. I learn a lot more when I can visit a site; my designs are much more informed” (PGS). Another student wrote about how site visits to a real neighborhood allows for a direct physical connection to the characteristics and particular challenges of the place:

We all had to come look at our area . . . and you have ideas when you’re looking at the map . . . but then when you actually come here, and you get the feeling for it, you realize that it would be very difficult, on [this street], to make it a kind of pedestrian, liveable space, just because it’s so loud and there’s such a volume of traffic. (DF)

The majority of students spoke about how having to present to planners caused them to take their roles more seriously. They rehearsed for the occasion to fine-tune the professionalism of their delivery (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Students from the imminent densification studio presenting their designs and critiques to planning officials and the public

A real design problem makes you take the project more seriously. Knowing that we were going to have to present to City of Vancouver planners at the end of the course motivated us to ensure all of our designs were as complete and thought out as possible. (PGS)

More was at stake when we were working on an existing neighborhood and on a current issue, which inspired me to work through challenges and push our ideas further. This also influenced me to consider, to a greater degree, how our design would be accepted by community members, planners, and other stakeholders. (PGS)

Actually having a real site and having people from the city come in and talk about what the issues are and talking about public participation and public needs and wants, brings everything back down to a level where we realize that there are potentially a lot more obstacles on that path to the idealistic design. (DF)

These comments are consistent with any reflective design studio in which the “real world” has to temper idealized visions and in which proposed changes have to be tested against their effects on current residents. The visits from community residents, community leaders, and professional planners not only enabled students to develop an understanding of the multitude of positions on the neighborhood but also added legitimacy to the students’ simulation of reality and instilled a sense of accountability to their efforts.

Discussion: Community of Practice and the Co-creation of a Design Artifact

Many characteristics of the HDS added to the real-world nature of the course. The realism went beyond the re-creation of an existing neighborhood in model form. It went beyond spatializing the contested design policies in the different neighborhoods. The realism came from the deep contextual awareness that the peer learning environment created. A collective ownership seems to have emerged over the model that is not unlike the sense of pride and ownership that community residents feel for their own home neighborhoods. Students developed a sense of community and common purpose in cocreating the model. Students were visibly offended when a team introduced a building that was so tall or so large that it was out of proportion for the neighborhood. They became protective of the form and character of the neighborhood. Their own reaction gave them a glimpse of what it is like to care for and fight for an existing community in the face of change. This was an invaluable lesson for them to learn as budding planners—not so that they would use the experience to excuse NIMBYism, but so that they can use it to contemplate the upheaval that planning can cause in people’s home neighborhoods, and so that they would act with sensitivity and empathy.

The model building process is necessarily a concrete experience as Kolb’s experiential learning model would describe it. It is also an artifact as Wenger’s communities of practice would define it. The model was collaboratively produced by a community of students engaged in practice. The practice was not a real “commission” with a major construction budget, but it was instigated by real clients seeking guidance in shaping the spatial destiny of their home neighborhoods. Building the model is a tactile act that requires the use of real materials, measured and cut to a scaled representation of an actual neighborhood. It is a craft that requires both precision and creativity and, most importantly, it is accessible to the novice designer. Students did not have to have any experience with design or graphic communication to participate. The use of the physical model as the primary vehicle of design expression deemphasized drawing and graphic communication skills. Simple construction, using cardstock and paper, enabled a sense of achievement for having built something that is recognizable and that is a culmination of synthetic thinking. While there were numerous comments detailing initial anxiety about the building of this large yet detailed object, twenty-one of twenty-three (91 percent) of the open-ended comments about the model in course evaluations across all three classes were positive.

The most common recurrence in each of the data sources of student comments was the sense of ownership over the model. This is exemplified by the following: “In addition to being a powerful way of visualizing the neighborhood, design, and design concepts, I think it was a great way to develop a sense of ownership. Because it was a time-consuming effort, it forced us to think more carefully about what interventions to introduce” (PGS). Another student wrote, “I enjoyed the hands-on approach and actually found that I really cared about the model and the changes we made” (CE). As each semester progressed, students became increasingly protective of the model and of the neighborhood it represented. In the HDS the artifact was not just commonly understood, as Wenger (2000) describes it, it was collectively created and, in one case, gifted to the community it represented. The simple act of building something together as a culmination of an evolving common understanding within the class and with area residents was powerful for the students. It created a sense of community among them as they experimented with the role of negotiating difference. They were not urban design experts, nor were they expected to be. In fact, as mentioned above, some of the details of their individual designs were mediocre. However, the model as a whole represented much more than the sum of the individual incremental designs. It represented a form of consensus that included many voices. The students practised their growing expertise as planners in working across difference and diversity. Because the medium of communication, negotiation, and expression was a physical model, they were able to advance their understanding of urban design. The hybrid learning environment enabled students to capitalize on their strengths while exploring tentative steps in areas that were new to them, and in which they were weak. As a result they became increasingly confident, and with time and further training, they would perhaps become more competent designers.

The tangible physical representation of urban design principles seemed to give students accelerated understanding of those principles. In every course evaluation, there were at least three comments exemplified by the following, “I loved the hands-on and ‘learning by doing’ approach of this class. We covered a lot of ground very quickly, but it worked” (CE). This was not a unanimous sentiment but it was a common one. There was also a drawback to having the model be so central to class discourse. While students demonstrated some engagement of the readings in their own presentations and in their written summaries of designs and critiques, they did not exhibit any sophistication in extracting insights from the readings or in developing a meta-analysis in the way that you would expect from a graduate seminar. This leads me to conclude that time allocated to readings and discussing the readings was insufficient to allow a meaningful integration of the literature. The dominance of the model as the central subject of discussion also meant that theoretical ideas were immediately filtered through the pragmatic lens of application to the “real world” of the model and the basic notions of compact mixed-use development. This suggests a limitation of the “model-centric” form of the hybrid course in facilitating theoretical understanding and development.

Underlying the very concept of hybridity is an assumption that neither the conventional design studio nor the community based planning workshop would, on their own, be able to achieve the combined goals of design literacy, spatial awareness, procedural knowledge, and phenomenological experience. Indeed, the hybrid studio is intended to achieve important learning opportunities from both the studio and the workshop and to add something that only their combination could achieve. This added benefit is the negotiation of a cocreated physical artifact of a future vision of an existing neighborhood that capitalizes on planning’s strengths while providing sufficient space, opportunity, and peer support for design thinking to be nurtured. There were enough features of the conventional design studio in the HDS to enable experimentation with different spatial configurations and understanding of the complexity of three-dimensional design and the implications of different design moves. There were enough features of the planning workshop in the HDS to enable an appreciation of real conflicts between different groups’ interests and aspirations and the challenges of representing multiple voices and negotiating a common vision. While the analysis presented here does not include an empirical comparison with either the design studio or the planning workshop, there is enough evidence to suggest that the hybrid has the potential to achieve more than the separate learning environments on their own, particularly for planning students.

Conclusion

There is a growing need for design education for planning students but little scholarship on the unique challenges and opportunities of teaching design to planning students. The challenges of a planning design studio are distinct both in terms of the prioritization of collaborative approaches to design and the challenges of simulating the often inconsistent, incongruous, and incremental nature of urban design. The hybrid design studio has the potential to make design more accessible. The co-creation of a design artifact can create a robust simulation of community dissent and contestation especially if imbedded in a real-world problem-solving mission. The combination of the artifact and the relationship to community representatives can serve to intensify engagement in the activities of the course and ultimately achieve urban design learning objectives. The formality of the peer learning process can also give added weight to diverse opinions and dissenting voices and thereby distinguishes the hybrid design studio as a planning studio that elevates the values of participatory and pluralistic design—so much so that the hybrid studio format may hold promise for a broader inculcation in the complexities of contested priorities in planning processes that go well beyond basic urban design teaching.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge Sarah Church who was coauthor of an earlier version of this article. This article would not have been possible without all the students who took my Physical Plan Analysis Class at the University of Utah’s College of Architecture + Planning and my Theory and Methods of Urban Design Class at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. I am also indebted to all the community partners, too many to list, who helped heighten the experiential learning of the hybrid studio.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Bio

Maged Senbel is an assistant professor of urban design at the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia. His research is primarily in the area of climate change planning and visualization media in public engagement for climate change planning.

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