A Beginners Mind

PROCEEDINGS
21st National Conference
on the Beginning Design Student

Stephen Temple, editor

Conference held at the

College of Architecture
The University of Texas at San Antonio
24-26 February 2005

A Beginners Mind
PROCEEDINGS
21st National Conference
on the Beginning Design Student
Stephen Temple, editor
College of Architecture
The University of Texas at San Antonio
24-26 February 2005

Situating Beginnings
Questioning Representation
Alternative Educations
Abstractions and Conceptions
Developing Beginnings
Pedagogical Constructions
Primary Contexts
Informing Beginnings
Educational Pedagogies
Analog / Digital Beginnings
Curriculum and Continuity
Interdisciplinary Curricula
Beginnings
Design / Build
Cultural Pluralities
Contentions
Revisions
Projections

Offered through the Research Office for Novice Design

Education, LSU, College of Art and Design, School of
Architecture.
Copyright 2006 University of Texas San Antonio
/ individual articles produced and edited by the authors

Printed proceedings produced by Stephen Temple, Associate Professor, University of Texas San Antonio.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without
written permission of the publisher.
Published by:
University of Texas San Antonio
College of Architecture
501 West Durango Blvd.
San Antonio TX 78207
210 458-3010
fax 210 458-3016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Temple, Stephen, editor
A Beginners Mind: Proceedings of the 21st National Conference on the Beginning Design Student /
edited and compiled by Stephen Temple
1. Architecture - Teaching 2. Architecture - Design 3. Design - Teaching

ISBN 0-615-13123-9

Mutant Methodology
SHAI YESHAYAHU-SHARABI, MARIA VERA
Southern Illinois University

I admire the dazzling manual skill acquired by the students through their instruction at
the Ecole des Beaux-ArtsI recognize the elegance, which guides the solutions of plan,
faade, and section. But, I should like to see intelligence dominating elegance...1
When the Cathedrals Were White, Le Corbusier

Perception is an essential cognitive process that constantly reorganizes our sensory

abilities to selectively modify our impressions. Thus, as the world of design evolves from a
discipline which served a selected few to an industry that encompasses all aspects of human
existence, we challenge pedagogies that institutionalized perception to specific design solutions.2
This paper, like Le Corbusiers statement, contest teaching methodologies that relies on
prescriptive techniques in order to educate future designers. Because design educators are
increasingly seeking an educational technique that can be as proliferate in its methodology as the
current market indicates the world of design is.
Here, Manuel De Landas novel approach to envision A Thousand Years of Nonlinear
History inspired us to pull away from handed down tutelage related to Tabula-Rasa ideologies
that encouraged future designers to discard previous knowledge and start anew [3]. This is
because we start from the premise that an education that follows a linear model is devoid of a
lifelong learning commitment and is immune to the likelihood that practice may be shaped by
multiple careers and trans-disciplinary collaboration. Accordingly, this decision leads us to
implement collaboratively exercises where the teaching approach would foster an individuals
personal intelligence. The goal of this approach is not to strip a person of his or her previous
knowledge nor inherent abilities, but to augment them by sharpening his or her immediate
awareness. It relies on the premise that every acquired knowledge or skill is an essential tool and
ought to yield much more than aesthetic language, program, or form.
Thus, regardless of the fact that we teach beginner design concepts to architecture and
interior design students, this paper highlights lessons that are applicable to all design disciplines.
It introduces mutant methodology as a teaching technique, which focuses on developing students
ability to research, fabricate discoveries, and document findings as their quest for detail
increases.
Initially, while implementing this teaching technique, some of the challenges that we
struggle with relate to the dependency students have on digital gadgetry that cultivates a desire
for immediate gratification and encapsulating working habits [Fig.1]. This digital obsession
disconnects students from their immediate environment and negates the needs of or benefits
from an open-ended education that allows for exchange of critical thought and combinatory
processes. It replaces creative thinking with an automatic pilot process that inhibits comparative
analysis.

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Fig.1 Digital Chaos; The what to do phase. In which the initial trials become pivotal to personal
acknowledgment as well as to group discussion on conceptual maturity and proper usage of media.

In this regard we seek to address and test these setbacks against the goals we are
striving to accomplish. For instance, the first time we meet, students are asked to observe their
own bodies and begin to document it. A way to teach or to learn this is by immersing the student
in a process where scale, movement and perception are recorded through pencil-paper drawings.
Immediately the students are confronted with their lack of knowledge about their own bodily
dimensions, motor skills, and perceptual abilities. As a result, they encounter difficulties grasping
the process of how to complete the assignment, and soon, need or demand help from their peers.
Many students rebel against the time consuming process that requires personal engagement with
others; but as they struggle to overcome this hurdle, they become more perceptive and start
projecting imaginative subtleties that are reflective of their individual creative voice [Fig.2].

Fig. 2 Delineation study of Body motion.

In the hope that they become fluent in their body-knowledge and capable of using the
newfound knowledge for design purposes, they will be assigned to tell a story about their newly
acquired knowledge. Telling a story becomes cumbersome and places all creative responsibility
on the students ability to recognize facts and observe detail. It is a task that cannot be answered
by the instructor; rather, it needs to be created by the individual who has to re-compose their
newfound knowledge, evoking relationships between movement, scale, vision and space.
As soon as they become conversant in design linguistics and documenting techniques,
they also become interested in how others have handled these challenges; they become curious
to see how theories and changes happen and begin to use their drawings and digital knowledge
in presentational form [Fig. 3]. Along the way personal techniques of representation become the
stimulus for further discourse and students begin to learn from each others material, igniting new
stories.

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Fig. 3 Embodied techniques; perception and movement.

Through different exercises and stories, students, like journalists, researchers,

economists, politicians, scientists, etc., collect information, and they make connections between
their observations and design processes. From their intellectual connections and design
fabrications they build files, catalogue findings and create indices which throughout the year
become personal archives that are instrumental for instructors to assess the diverse skills
students have or are quickly acquiring as they learn to review their peers work and analytically
critique their own accomplishments.
Hence, cultivating attention to detail and paying attention to personal, physical, and
sensory stimulus allows for the development of their fundamental knowledge to flourish. In time,
students own creativity would seem incidental; innate, almost anticipated by the world of design
and our evolving idea about teaching students to think in a nonlinear manner also seems inherent
in the mixture of other interacting perceptual reorganizations [Fig. 4 & 5]. Thus, De Landas
historical trajectory [geological, biological and linguistic], informs the beginning of our
methodological development, which introduces a combinatory process of thought in the design
curriculum.

Fig. 4 & 5 Material tactility serve as a stimulus in the creative exploration process.

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We live in a world populated by structures-a complex mixture of geological, biological,

social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials
shaped and hardened by history. Immersed as we are in this mixture, we cannot help but
interact in a variety of ways with the other historical constructions that surround us, and in
these interactions we generate novel combinations, some of which possess emergent
properties. In turn, these synergistic combinations, whether of human origin or not,
become the raw material for further mixtures. This is how the population of structures
inhabiting our planet has acquired its rich variety, as the entry of novel materials into the
mix triggers wild proliferations of new forms.
Manuel De Landa
Emerging from a philosophical understanding that evolution is a complex mixture of
historical processes, this paradigm shift postulates that educational values can no longer be
exclusively informed linearly but rather conceived as a heterogeneous model of thought, in spite
of the fact that history is perceived or taught as a linear progression.
Our current response acknowledges history as a stratum, a mesh of events, viewed as
layered information where linkages tend to divert from lateral trajectories into occurrences, leaps,
and/or connections that revoke linearity [4].
Departing from this premise we ask our students to reconstruct ten historically known
villas that range from classical to contemporary times with scale as the common denominator.
Here, accurate documentation on the part of each student becomes critical in order to provide the
class with an opportunity to develop highly personalized logs that will later be used to process,
decipher, interpret and ultimately create new ideas. Although a timeline system places these
buildings in their historical context, almost instantly, through analytical interpretations, the
displacement of linear relationships occurs. Students start to introduce cross-references as a
collective transfer of knowledge, igniting complex undertakings and a fresh accumulation of
information which generates new ideas and allows the students own log formation to flourish.
This technique, which permits students to combine [consciously or subconsciously]
events that are not sequential, but are more like cinematographic samplings, triggers a
proliferation of discourse without linear bearing. It reconsiders how the selection of forms,
composition, proportion, harmony, etc., can suggest waste of resources or how it celebrates or
trivializes the environment we live in.
At times, interpretations of previous theories are transformed into combinatorial
methodologies of design, thereby broadening both creative palette and future outputs. Ultimately,
this process allows compiled data to be perpetually renewed [Fig. 6].

Fig.6 Sequence breakdown of exploration and representation

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In sum, at the core of our mutant methodology lies a fundamental shift that removes
instructors from the role of conductor to one of moderator, empowering students to undertake
creative responsibility for the work they produce. It does not prescribe educators with formulas
that will yield crafted results, however, it provokes an open-ended code of interconnected
processes whereby design becomes a collective undertaking to influence pluralistic changes.
Notes
[1] Wheelwright, Peter Matthiessen. Remarks delivered for the design-in-education panel at the opening of
the Center for Architecture in NYC, http://www.pmwarchitects.com/ac_why.htm.
[2] Mau, Bruce, and Institute Without Boundaries. Massive Change: A Manifesto for the Future Global
Design Culture. London: Phaidon, 2004.
[3] Varnelis, Kazys. The Education of the Innocent Eye: Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 51/4, 1998:
212 - 223
[4] De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Swerve Editions. New York: Zone Books,
1997: 257-274
References
De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Swerve Editions. New York: Zone Books, 1997.
Donald, Janet Gail. Learning to Think: Disciplinary Perspectives. 1st ed, The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult
Education Series. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002.
Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. 10th anniversary ed. New York, NY:
BasicBooks, 1993.
Goodman, Nelson. Of Mind and Other Matters. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.

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