The networked studio: first cooperation, then design

Abstract

This paper examines the potential development of architectural education and its current studio practices through the creation of a new type of course model that involves learner entanglement in multiple networked learning environments. A course model created for the postgraduate course of urban design at the National Technical University of Athens challenged the spatial and the conceptual notions of where and how new knowledge is produced. It did so by creating immersive learning experiences where all the individuals involved in the process and despite their current status could become active learners and renegotiate their presence and their notions in relation to each other and to the rest of the world.
Course design draws from the theories of blended and networked learning to create an amalgam of different, yet interconnected learning events. Learners are called upon to interact with each other and with external agents in different physical or virtual settings and with different means and technologies. These include a series of formal or informal encounters within the physical boundaries of the area under examination and with people who are either its immediate stakeholders, or practicing professionals who can offer different insights on how to read and manage it. This is a model that promotes transdisciplinarity, by favoring cooperation in the space in between what is well known and defined. The role of the academy returns to its original immaterial form as cooperation; the studio's placelessness embraces all places as learning spaces.
Knowledge production processes in this paradigm reside in the constitution of the network of multiple and conflicting realities where design is a product of experimentation, exchange, dialogue and cooperative work among interacting individuals. Cooperative practices are not simply called upon to facilitate design, but constitute the design praxis themselves as learners are called upon to transverse their networks of connections and meaning to create viable strategies for intervention.