This discussion outlines the new and critical thinking on design pedagogy and the numerous issues that the contemporary design education must confront.
[IN]: The academics of architecture have been widely debated over the years – with many arguments as to how it should be taught and learnt. In a subjective world where there is no empirical measurement of good aesthetics, the values, motivating factors and dispositions of every individual are as closely linked to their academic nurturing. In your observation, how is contemporary architectural and design education different from the standardised curriculum-based system? What are the new / fresh ideas in design education and pedagogy?
Vishwanath Kashikar [VK]: A curriculum consists of a vision statement, a curricular structure, and a syllabus. This curriculum document, combined with the lesson plan and student outputs, like projects and exams, provide a comprehensive insight into the education system. Unfortunately, most curriculum documents are limited to the syllabus i.e., a list of courses and their contents. Standardized syllabi are a problem, not only for design education but for any education, because it assumes the teacher to be merely an instructor whose primary job is to transmit predetermined skills and knowledge. The primary purpose of a curriculum document is to ‘standardize’ education. This standardization might be problematic if it is a standardization in time [outdated curriculum] or a standardization across a vast number of learners [e.g., a singular nationwide curriculum]. The need of the day is not so much ‘new/fresh’ ideas; rather we need to reiterate the age-old larger goal of education- to nurture sensitive and aware citizens who can meaningfully contribute to society. I come across many new and innovative ways of teaching across some architecture schools in India. They might be few and far between but will hopefully have a slow trickle effect on other institutions. However, most of these innovations are at the course level and are led by individual teachers. Rarely have I come across a rethinking of education at the curriculum level.
A. Srivathsan [AS]: I assume that by a standardised curriculum, you refer to the one circulated by the Council of Architecture (CoA). Since the CoA is yet to articulate academic expectations regarding principles and outcomes, its curriculum appears to be the only benchmark. Hence many believe it must be enforced verbatim. However, contrary to what many colleges think, the CoA curriculum is only a guideline and not necessarily totally binding. We must consider the CoA curriculum a minimum requirement to become a registered professional. If we take such an approach, which CoA has also stated on many occasions, there is scope for diverse possibilities around a common core. I am aware that many schools with fewer human resources find CoA’s curriculum helpful. They sometimes use it to persuade the less understanding management to deliver acceptable quality of education.
Only a small number of institutions constantly recalibrate their course and reflectively look at what they teach. What distinguishes them is that they are alert to the possibilities in the light of their shortcomings, challenges and opportunities. As much they seek blue sky ideas, good institutes often realise they have to persistently focus on doing what they have already got correct. I believe that curriculum is only a part of education. Creating an environment that encourages exploration and learning is equally vital. We need a vision, a clear understanding of desired trajectories, and attention to teaching methods. At the centre of a good education are committed teachers. We must admit that this has not been easy in our context since schools have a wide disparity regarding resources, access to good teachers, connection with practices, financial abilities and management practices. Currently, metro-centric colleges appear better placed in terms of focus and location. Unless we achieve a high average across schools, we cannot think we have improved.
R. Kiran Kumar [KK]: The first step would be to accept that the academics of architecture are as subjective as the practice of architecture itself. Seeking objectivity only in academics might be an inequitable ideal. I think the journey of academics must shuttle rigorously between the logical and the rational. As both a student and a teacher of Architectural Theory, I believe it is a space which can mediate the spectrum between objectivity and subjectivity. For example, Frampton’s ‘Ten Points of Critical Regionalism’ or Alexander’s ‘Fifteen principles of wholeness’ can be a point of entry or departure to understand the complexity of the architectural process. There should be two pedagogical approaches, or ‘schools of thought’ at two scales – one at the level of the school and another at the level of the studio. An articulated combination of these two methods will play an important role in supporting academic frameworks. The Sri Lankan architectural academia is a good example of a system which has articulated its values in a succinct way, and this is both relevant and exploratory.
[IN]: Creating an educational framework around design requires a multi-structured approach with numerous people working together to achieve a common goal. The contemporary institution must therefore look beyond its walls. For an institution in the present time, what, according to you, are the most important issues it must address? How can we broaden the prerogative of design education?
[VK]: Reaching out to primary schools across India to introduce design thinking as distinct from art and painting is the single most important contribution institutions can make for design education. Designing buildings is only one form of architectural practice. Recognizing and addressing this in education will help broaden as well as give wider acceptance to the various forms of architectural practice.
Institutions are not marketplaces; they should not be ranked. Architectural education in the past decade, however, has become an extremely competitive space. Instances of collaboration between institutions for mutual benefit are few and far between. This affects the quality of education in many institutions which then impacts the value of an architect in society. Education as a profession is older than architecture! I am reminded of one of my teachers who was an excellent subject expert but a poor teacher. I always wondered what would have happened if that teacher had taught like some of my other teachers who were extremely skilled in the art of teaching. Institutions should focus on educating the teachers. Simultaneously, expert generalists from the education discipline should be an integral part of curriculum design and development.
[AS]: Architecture education and institutions often claim to be well connected and grounded in the world. They emphasise that they have come a long way from looking at design as a mere technical venture. Every school is talking about sustainability, net zero and social inclusion. Including such a list does not make for a meaningful engagement. We need to examine how education addresses these issues.
One can evaluate it from two ends – level of engagement and depth of training. Architecture education tells the students they are professionals and can claim a set of privileges from society. As well-trained experts in design, they can have exclusive rights to practice. They must also be aware that society equally expects and wants to know how design education and designers are helping improve its conditions.
Structurally we can do three things. First, admit that we can no longer train designers who imagine themselves as an individual genius. Instead, prepare them to be part of larger teams that handle complex problems. Designers cannot solve everything alone; not all problems are design problems either. Second, we can widen and diversify the design situations we immerse and address. For instance, architecture studios need not only address green field sites. They must take up retrofitting, how to optimise resources, achieve better energy efficiency, and reduce waste. Make these and other related aspects the underpinning elements of design decisions and evaluation.
The third is the larger change to the programme. Give up the five-year straight jacketed architectural education structure and divide it into two phases. After building the core skills, providing a liberal education, and building essential design skills in the first three years, allow students to choose their course. Provide multiple streams and pathways they can pursue for the next two years. As much as strengthening the licensed professional stream, it should also encourage working with community practices, creating research verticals, adopting technological innovations and so on.
[KK]: One of the key challenges of institutional structures are to work in collaboration with an overview of multiple conditions (for example, services, engineering, structures, bill of quantities, etc.), to create an education framework that synthesizes pragmatics with aesthetic nuance. In our post-modern world where our choices are infinite, finding a common ground can prove to be difficult. Even if a group of academics do not agree with one another, they need to be able to temporarily find a common ground. Established schools have handed over their seasoned pedagogical insights with time, while newer schools must build them. I believe that the biggest challenge today is to find a balance between how to teach architecture, and what influences architecture. A right amount of exposure to social, cultural and political aspects without diluting focus on what architects can contribute as performing citizens, is necessary to develop the required design thinking.
[IN]: We live in a consistently globalising world. However, in contrast, we have seen greater emphasis on the boundaries – national, linguistic, religious, ideological. Architecture and design pedagogy seems increasingly distant from the social, economic and political realities of our world. How can we make design education more empathetic and sensitive to the growing inequality and strife in our world? How can we educate students to confront and address the realities of the human condition?
[VK]: Boundaries are being drawn with greater vigour today because deep down we have realized that such divides do not make sense in a contemporary world. It is the last gasp of a dying imagination. Inequality in quality of life as a direct result of wealth is the most worrisome divide and needs to be addressed by the architecture profession as well.
The first step towards a more empathetic design education must come from architectural practice. The prevalent model of architectural practice can only cater to wealthy clients. Barring the cross subsidy model, I have not come across any architecture practice that can sustainably work for a substantial proportion of our population. Consequently, most institutions strive to produce architects who can design for this elite group of clients. There are exceptions in education, like participatory design studios for the socially or economically challenged sections of society. But these are exceptions rather than the norm. Discussing security cabin and janitors rest areas in otherwise celebrated works of architecture is a reality check. Why can’t we insist on thinking of all users in all design studios just as we demand anthropometric or structural response?
[AS]: This question reminds me of an exhibition curated by the renowned philosopher Bruno Latour titled ‘Making things public: Atmospheres of Democracy.’ The exhibition asked, while we know democracy as a political idea, what would it entail in the real world of things? Taking a cue from this, we must ask what inequality means to architects and architecture. Can we point out how it manifests?
There are a few things architecture can address and some things it cannot. We can quickly turn into social engineers in an attempt to fix an array of problems. This may appear as a truism or me belabouring a simple point, but I am concerned that our discipline is replete with positions and rhetoric that everything is architecture.
Having said this, let me turn to what an architecture education can do. The first, is to understand that the notion of context has to extend beyond the physical setting. Architecture is practised within the existing social and economic conditions. While discussing architects’ autonomy and agency, we must realise what works within the larger social conditions. Second, design studios consistently imagine that the stakeholders of projects are often individual. If we claim to be adequately grounded in the real world, we should be catering to collectives and multiple stakeholders. In this way, we will see design as an act of negotiating competing values and demands. We may realise that consensus may not always be possible, and the politics of trade-offs can turn antagonistic. In the process, the designer’s position will be known or made known and open for scrutiny. Third, connected with the second point, we must engage with a wider spectrum of problems. Affordable housing has to find more space; designing for better environmental performance has to gain ground, and evaluating framework has to change. The key point is linking our knowledge pursuit with the world around us and the experiences it offers.
Finally, let us say we manage to introduce all these changes and write them down in our project briefs. The next question is, do we have enough competent people to teach and take students through such complexities?
[KK]: In order to answer this broad question, I am going to take the help of John Ruskin. As a description of a brilliant drawing of an ordinary dry leaf, he wrote, “If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world.” It is not the object of introspection which is remarkable, but the care taken to do it. In a similar notion, we can be conscious to address the human condition in a large project, or even in a matter of drawing a detail of a wall section. While resolving a pragmatic architectural problem, one can condense in it, the care taken for being sensitive towards the human condition.
[IN]: The modernist paradigm of design education had an unwavering focus on form. While this was an expression of the time, the models of education and teaching created before the 1990s, seem increasingly out of touch. What, according to you, are ingredients of a contemporary design curriculum? How can we make design more relevant to the questions of our time?
[VK]: Form is no longer the focus in design education; the focus has shifted to the image. More people see a work of architecture online, than in person. Clients and interns choose architectural practice based on their image. Architecture has been dissected into two components- plan organization assessed through the lens of efficiency, and façade assessed through the lens of imageability.
There are many ‘questions of our time.’ If architecture is a profession and not customer service, an architect must formulate an ideological position vis-a-vis larger social good and actively work towards nudging society in that direction. The role of education is to nurture and facilitate architects to formulate this position and equip them with skills to manifest the same in society.
The most relevant question of our time is time itself. Society is fast losing the capacity to dwell on things. Curricula should respond to this by creating learning models that encourage slow and reflective processes in conjunction with decisiveness. Learning has also become insular; we read and analyse social contexts from within the comforts of the studio using the internet as a primary resource. Whereas this is extremely helpful, it takes away the aspect of immersive and experiential learning. We need to take architectural education outside the campus, not as site visits of shorter durations but as semester long engagements.
[AS]: The list is long: Design education must train students to make informed judgments, substantiate decisions through evidence and reasonable arguments, remain open to views, be agile to contingencies, develop the ability to negotiate, and know that society at large is our ultimate client. These are needed alongside the abilities to solve design problems, put things together, build well, produce evocative things, and communicate well visually, verbally and through writing.
The problem is not that we do not know what to offer or do. The challenge is to convert what we know into concrete steps and deliver them. In this context, we seldom honestly examine institutional capacities – both human resources and financial capacities. Out of the 450-plus institutions in India, many have severe limitations. One can lay out desirable goals to reach, but the real picture is that many will find it difficult to achieve them. Government policies focus only on producing a few centres of excellence, and do not worry about many other colleges.
In this context, regulatory and professional collectives such as CoA and IIA must contribute more. Regulations cannot stifle innovations. Instead, they must be proactive, light-touch, and aware of the finical implications. Professional bodies could serve better by extending a supportive infrastructure. We need a pragmatic approach, and we need it urgently.
[KK]: In the design studios I conduct, I still use ‘form’ as a key agency, as architectural form is the most evident and tangible means to reveal the intent and grammar of architecture. I think having only ‘form’ as a singular focus is limiting, in the modernist sense, but it can also be a fertile carrier or container for other values, such as the intimacy of interior space, or the expression of the tectonics of a material. I would like to cite two books which speak about ‘spaces’ and ‘forms’ with an interesting lens of observation: the first is ‘Manual of Section,’ by David J. Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, and Paul Lewis, which explores reading architecture only through sections. The second is Robert McCarter’s ‘The Space Within: Interior Experience as the Origin of Architecture’, which interrogates the radical spatial possibilities of the early modern architecture. So instead of addressing ‘form’ with a strong singular focus, a multi-faceted approach like these, may help.
[IN]: In years to come, design pedagogy will not only be required to focus on building technical and professional capabilities of an institution. It will be compelled to delimit and re- configure the present structure of the curriculum.
In your opinion, what are the most essential issues / concerns that design education must address / confront to continue to be relevant to the larger society? What is the future of design education from your vantage point?
[VK]: Educational institutions should be visionary as opposed to reactionary in nature; they should have long term (10+ years) as opposed to short term goals and should be agile and nimble as opposed to being rigid and sluggish. This requires a wholistic approach focusing on institutional structure and culture over and above the curriculum. Only then will we continue to remain relevant to society.
At the curricular level, the idea of long-term goals coupled with agility creates a complex challenge. As a first step, we need to create curricula using a design paradigm as opposed to a purely rational process. And to borrow a phrase from Donald Schon, we need to move from technical rationality to reflection in-action. This can be made possible only when we have a discursive platform for design teachers, a platform not for assessment but for reflection.
The bulk of mainstream architectural practice today is elitist and are already irrelevant for large sections of society. We need to substantially reimagine modes of architectural practice and this can only come when educational institutions see themselves provocateurs and not providers.
[AS]: Design education’s future lies in training students to serve how well they build a wider constituency for good design through their outputs. The good design here would include, as best captured by the renowned German designer Dieter Rams principles: innovative, long-lasting, useful, less but better, environment friendly and aesthetic. Building institutional capacities is vital to achieving this.
As many have pointed out, an institution is a creative ground, the fertile land and students as potential seeds that flourish in it. We have so far paid attention and made demands only on the students. Institutions must provide more diversity and explore various paths. It must take full responsibility for what they teach. No regulatory or financial reasons will be acceptable for poor training. While education is embedded in its social conditions, it must constantly seek ways to improve them. In that pursuit, education draws from and contributes to practice and research. Hence, strengthening the continuum between the three is more critical than debating the difference and arguing which is more important.
Education must be engaging, relevant and provoke students—no more passive forms of teaching. Invest in enthusiastic teachers, enrich the campus experience, and show it as a place that adds value. Provide shared facilities and, towards that, build a network amongst institutions. Bring making further to the center of learning and enhance public engagement. The list can go on. It is important to commence and make concrete, immediate changes, however small they may be.
[KK]: I am going to plainly borrow Pallasmaa (from the brilliant book, The Thinking Hand) here:
In addition to opérative and instrumental knowledge and skills, the designer and the artist need existential knowledge moulded by their experiences of life. Existential knowledge arises from the way the person experiences and expresses his/her existence, and this knowledge provides the most important context for ethical judgment. In design work, these two categories of knowledge merge, and as a consequence, the building is a rational object of utility and an artistic/existential metaphor at the same time. All professions and disciplines contain both categories of knowledge in varying degrees and configurations. The instrumental dimensions of a craft can be theorised, researched, taught and incorporated in the practice fairly rationally, whereas the existential dimensions are integrated within one’s own self-identity, life experience and ethical sense as well as one’s personal sense of mission. The category of existential wisdom is also much more difficult to teach, if not outright impossible. Yet, it is the irreplaceable condition for creative work
The challenge is on the how to teach the instrumental knowledge in a skill full way and create opportunities which weave existential wisdom⊗
VISHWANATH KASHIKAR’S interest in education developed while watching his mother design learning aids for 1st grade students. In architectural education, he is primarily interested in the relation between creativity and criticality, and tensions between curricula and pedagogy. He has honed this interest over the years by teaching all courses [except structures] at the undergraduate level and by completing several online courses on education. During his bachelor’s studies at CEPT and master’s studies at NUS, Singapore he has also developed an interest in urban housing design and has conducted several studios, and courses on urban housing in India.
R. KIRAN KUMAR is an architect based in Mysore, currently teaching as Associate Professor at WCFA, Mysore. Kiran is a graduate from USD, Mysore and post-graduate in Theory and Design from CEPT, Ahmedabad. He is involved in teaching drawing, theory, and design subjects. Inclined towards understanding architecture through creative drawing methods and architectural ideas, particularly which are heuristic in nature. He blogs at mofussillab.com.
A. SRIVATHSAN is an architect and urban designer and currently heads the Centre for Research on Architecture and Urbanism at CEPT University. Previously, he was the Academic Director of CEPT University and before that worked as a senior journalist. His research and writings include themes of Indian cities and contemporary architectural practices. His recent works include the co-authored paper titled `The long-arc history of Chennai’s unaffordable housing’ and the co-edited book titled `The Contemporary Hindu Temple- Fragments for a History.’
POLEMICS records a discussion with consequential design thinkers and practitioners in India from multiple vantage points on the common concerns of the profession.
