Category: Uncategorized

During Finals Week I went to the SmartGeometry Workshop

Get an in-depth introduction about graduate studies in architecture by coming to Grad Day at the UO Architecture Department’s Portland branch.

In Portland, University of Oregon connects Architecture students to professionals who are pioneering Eco-Districts, green buildings and design process innovation.  Students can be immersed in sustainable communities where urban agriculture, composting, public transit and bicycling are the norm.  They can work with national leaders in shaping how cutting edge-standards like the Living Building Challenge and Passive House can be applied to real-world situations.  Instruction is at an advanced level as students arrive with basic architectural training completed at our main Eugene campus or other colleges or universities.

For those who are eager to change the world, our program gives the the concepts, examples and contacts to make it happen, in a supportive hands-on atmosphere.  We invite potential graduate students to learn more about us in a special Grad Day open-house on Nov. 4, 2011 where we provide an in-depth introduction to the M.Arch. programs.  Students will have the opportunity to learn about the curriculum, interact with faculty and students, then inspect design projects and facilities.  The core activities occur 10:00am-2:30pm with lunch provided, additional touring and social opportunities follow.  See draft schedule.

RSVP to Kirsten Poulsen-House

Univ. of Oregon students setup final presentations at the Yale Union Contemporary Art Center. Brian Schmidt presents to Mark Perepelitza, Lin Sealy, Craig Davis & Tobin Weaver. Audrey Snyder presents to Robert Liberty, William Robert Taylor in foreground. Photos by Suenn Ho

Today, I gave a brief tribute to our graduating M.Arch. and B.Arch. students.  Teachers and students alike are relieved to see the great results of their efforts. (Final projects will be posted on my studio’s blog , lighting projects are buried in the online spool.) Here is my advice for the students…

---

Starting a new project mean facing a blank sheet of paper.  Placing the first mark sets up what else can happen, as every mark drawn changes what the designer sees.  Through building up these marks, the designer creates a world of possibilities.

In school, teachers guide this mark-making through design challenges of increasing complexity. By the final year, our architecture students help define the inquiry. They decide what matters, where the first mark goes.  Upstairs, we can see you did a great job in filling those blank sheets of paper.

At graduation, you are given a big new sheet of paper, the mother of all blank pieces of paper.

To fill this paper, look around you.  Paul Polak, who Designs for the Other 90%, says architects and designers just need to Ask.  Every community knows its problems.  By asking, he found the need for water in third world countries and invented by low-cost irrigation and filtration systems.  If you can find a problem and a means to address it, then you can create yourself a job.  Even better, a meaningful question can drive a series of projects in which you build expertise to share.

So to fill the new sheet of paper, look to your community.  This circle of family and friends can be a well-spring for creative challenges.  AND they can provide a wealth of collaborative expertise.  Your ideal partner loves to do what you hate to do. Through partnering, you can leverage your vision.

In this networked world, your success depends on the success of others.  A friend of mine says, you succeed by making your boss look good.  So today, you have succeeded by making your teachers and your parents look good.  We are basking in the reflected glory of your success.

From Feb. 4, 2011…..I feel very lucky to have been involved with Cohort V of the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research.  The organizers have tuned cultivating a research community to a T.  They set up the organizational framework to maximize getting a serious commitment from all participants.  Each team had to submit a proposal that promised that the school would promise to send a representative to workshops twice a year for three years and put money up front for workshop expenses.  Each year they launch a new cohort with representatives from 7 to 10 schools, with the more experienced ones providing research findings, areas for further inquiry and sundry advice.

The leaders guide those new to the specialization through a serious research methods bootcamp, consisting of expert presentations and large group discussions interspersed with relevant individual and small group exercises.  The leaders social-engineer the small groups so that participants first get to know a wide sampling of peers through round-robin encounters.  Pairs of teams are given time to develop closer relationships through intense brainstorming and feedback sessions.   Teams are guided in defining and refining their research question, finding relevant precedent research, approaching data collection and analysis, identifying relevant resources, allies and dissemination outlets.  Required to plan a schedule of deliverables, each team a private consultations with a coalition leader between meetings.  The check-ins help keep progress moving and provide a natural support base.

While we focus on pedagogical research to improve teaching and learning, we also get many useful ideas about effectively implementing technology in higher-education.  Cohort members have shared tips about orchestrating change in complex organizations, and specifying, selecting and implementing specific types of eportfolio technologies.

As many of our colleagues have encountered big roadblocks due to funding crises, changes in leadership and staffing, organizational inertia or politics, poor technology partners, we feel relatively lucky to have muddled along without a big disaster.

While we felt guilty about not following a linear path in our research, we realized that gradually refining the research question through iterative efforts fit our professional practices.  Just as in Design, in Action Research, the question is emergent rather than pre-determined.  We can’t really determine the most relevant Yes or No until we get to know the territory.  We began with a larger area of inquiry and gradually narrowed our inquiry to “Can we help students create meaning from curricular and co-curricular experiences through digital reflection?”   As we moved from specification to implementation, we discovered and refined our interest.

We felt a little inept because we weren’t doing much counting. But at the final meeting we heard that the richness of qualitative methods were more robustly informative, interesting, and relevant to implementation since quantitative studies are so intrinsically bound to a specific context.

The lesson for the weekend is that Context matters. Keynote speaker of the VT Higher Education Pedagogy symposium, Carolin Kreber explained that quantitative studies tell what worked in one location at one time, not what will work universally.  As our UO research partners come from Business, Arts Administration and Architecture, we have been constantly struggling to find commonalities across disciplines as well as to understand the uniqueness of each curricular situation and what combination of pedagogy and technology best suits it.

For our final INCEPR presentation, I concentrated on how words and graphics can complement each other in learning about architectural design.  Words can help focus concepts while allowing the form to be fluid.  Graphics and spatial models can organize complexity, but can lead to functional fixedness.  Since the creative process depends on re-reading new possibilities, it is fostered by the open-ended quality of writing and messy sketches.

We can steer design students by being cognizant how words and images can be useful at different stages of the Kolb Learning Cycle.  For example:

1. Concrete experience – On-site sensory reconnaissance

2. Reflective Observation – Site documentation – drawing & writing

3. Abstract Conceptualization – Analytical site diagrams

4. Active Experimentation – Scheming through design sketches & sketch models:  iterative attempts to understand what works and doesn’t work

Designers use analytical diagrams for Abstract Conceptualization and parti diagrams, sketch models and sketches for Active Experimentation.  Both graphics and text are important for design eportfolios.  Words help focus intention while allowing formal flexibility and subtlety.  Graphics can provide  organizational frameworks for information.  We need text because geometry can create functional fixedness – no ambiguity for rich reinterpretation.

My next steps include more in depth study of literature on reflection in eportfolios (Darren Cambridge’s book, Kemper’s scale of reflection, Cohort literature) and getting help on meaningful data collection and interpretation. I still feel like a novice at educational theory and have plenty to learn about both qualitative and quantitative research methods.   Perhaps Helen Barrett or Jonathon Richter could help our team with an approach for interpreting the piles of interviews, surveys and portfolio analyses that we have generated.

In case you are wondering why I’m encouraging students to blog, please see this recorded video. My part starting at 36 minutes into this 1 hour presentation + ~ 1 hour of Q&A, I focus on transitioning from presentation portfolios to reflective journals. I explain how I see opening up the university doors with the Web, and lessons learned about design collaboration.

“As higher education continues to move forward on incorporating blogging into the classroom, what are the implications for instruction at the University of Oregon? Join a panel of faculty and instructors who are currently using the UO’s WordPress blogging technology to supplement instructional practices. Areas of instruction such as student journaling, creative writing, eportfolios, and course management will be discussed.”

Panelists:
Mark Blaine, School of Journalism and Communication;
Ron Bramhall, Lundquist College of Business;
Nancy Cheng, Architecture;
Lori Hager, Arts Administration;
Moderator:
Andrew Bonamici, University Libraries

Windows users may need to use IE to get it working. Firefox should work for Mac users. Or download the session from the main Tanberg Content Server page find “Date: 10 Nov 2010 – 2:02 pm”. (Look for Mark’s yellow shirt on the left, then use the “download” pulldown on the right to select your format of choice.)

See some of the slides in high-res in a related “Eportfolio Learning for 21st Century Readiness” presentation for the Electronic Portfolio Action and Communication group.

I put together a map of places to see in San Francisco for our new grad students. Red marks our meeting places, purple shows historic structures, pink means museums, blue means other buildings of interest, green trees means open space.
View San Francisco Arch & UD highlights in a larger map

I am happy to have the opportunity to direct the UO Portland Architecture Program. Here are my notes from Thursday’s welcome for new students….

1. Starting a new degree program is a major life decision: it can be really exciting … and really terrifying. I used to be a terrible decision maker, always fretting over whether I would choose the right path, so coming to Oregon was a hard decision. My sister-in-law explained that every decision is made with limited information and instead of only having one right answer, often many of the paths could be good ones.

You can MAKE your decision to be here into a great choice. Like a design concept, the initial choice is just a seed. Many seeds have great potential to be successful. A seed only grow into a fluorishing plant if you nurture it every day. So, take advantage of the resources here, make our deficiencies into your opportunities.

2. The faculty at Oregon have a created a student-centered structure. We have non-graded vertical studios to support peer learning and recognize that students learn things at different rates and contribute different abilities. We mix jury reviews with round-robin reviews to create a more humane situation. Our students help shape the school through student organizations such as *Portland Student Activity Council, HOPES Ecological Design Conference and by contibuting to lectures and exhibitions.

So when I say the Portland Architecture Program is a great place, I am counting on you to help make this place great. Your entering Option II class makes up 30% of all the AAA students in Portland. We need your energy, your enthusiasm and your ideas to make a vibrant learning community. We want you to help make the studio environment a wonderful place to be: supportive, clean and beautiful. So display your best work and ask the most provocative questions.

3. We want to empower each of you to address our world’s most pressing problems: We want you
– to identify, research and analyze crucial issues,
– to find partners who can easily do what you can’t do and
– to develop creative solutions where others have seen only problems.

We want these two years to be a portal to your professional architectural career. We want you to discover questions that will intrigue you for a lifetime. We want you to find friends, mentors and interdisciplinary colleagues who will become your lifelong and lifewide network. As faculty, our success depends on your success.

Welcome to the University of Oregon!

I’m puzzled how to allow people to download my information without making a big spam invitation.  Yikes.  At the moment my online vcard is a bit disfunctional because it gives my email as “nywc at uoregon dot edu” Since most of the  robo-spammers can get past that one, I don’t know if it makes any sense to make the real people frustrated.

So as usual – caught between the convenience of the ugly card and spending endless hours figuring out the customization.  With just a little bit more time, I’m sure I can figure out how to make the corners of the boxes rounded…