A study on the socratic method in architectural design education

The act of design, central to architectural education, poses a significant challenge for students whose pre-university education has predominantly cultivated verbal and mathematical modes of thinking, often leading to difficulties in adapting to the visual and sensory processes required for design. To address this issue, this thesis proposes and evaluates an original pedagogical framework for foundation studies in design. The primary objective is to develop a model based on formal methods of reasoning—Induction and Analogy—where the fundamentals of visual language are taught through the analytical abstraction of photography. Structured as a case study within a Design-Based Research (DBR) framework, the model was implemented in a first-year design studio at the Department of Architecture, Çukurova University. Photographs served as concrete datasets for analysis, and students' two- and three-dimensional abstract representations, created during the Analogy stage, were the primary data. These works were subsequently analyzed using a Retrospective Interpretive Analysis (RIA) informed by Gestalt principles of perception. The findings demonstrate that the model is both applicable and effective. Despite initial adaptation challenges, students showed increased motivation and enhanced abstraction skills over time. The model was also found to support higher-order thinking skills as defined by Lipman (2003). RIA, confirmed that students learned to distill the underlying abstract principles (e.g., balance, rhythm, dominance) from photographs, rather than merely representing the objects themselves, and successfully transferred these principles into new, original compositions. This thesis, therefore, contributes a unique pedagogical model that structures the abstraction process through formal methods of reasoning and positions photography as an analytical tool within design fundamentals.