Introducing A Design Creativity Card Tool For Students Of Architecture

ABSTRACT: Architectural educations‟ main goal is to provide students integrated skills and knowledge. Design studio has significant role in this educational procedure. In this different environment, transmitting the knowledge is taking place through critiques. While more or less, finding design solutions and creating creative forms by students under controlled supervision taking place in different design semesters and years, students‟ independency is expected to increase. Despite many educational attempts at design studios still this objective is not achieved and lack of supportive educational methods or tools is acknowledged by many scholars. The aim of this research is to develop an auxiliary tool called flash card system, to be used in parallel with design studio critique sessions, and help students in decision makings and aids them to manage their own design process. Multilayered methodology is used in this study which consists of two phases. First phase tries to find student‟s critical stages in their design process by conducting interviews with instructors and distribution of questionnaire among architecture students at EMU. In the second phase, studying, analyzing and categorizing features of three well-known design methods presented by Alexander, Schon and Fakhra, this study tries to coincident their strengths with needs and expectations of case study (department of architecture EMU) and develop a user-friendly model in flash card format. The data analyses have shown that students‟ and tutors‟ are all agree in two main critical stages of design which are data development (synthesis) and form making. The developed and proposed model and flash cards are trying to bridge those critical stages, which are mainly escaped by students with other stages of design process. Since all of presented instructions and clues in proposed flash cards are stem from direct observations at midterm and final jury sessions at EMU, it could be acknowledged that existing procedure at studios are covering any aspect of design from tutors side but students need to adopt and equip with sequences, priorities and creativity in each step, to have better time managing as well as good outcomes. Final results of this study reveal the flash cards are properly serving what was expected from it. Keywords: Architectural education, Design process, Design auxiliary model, Flash card. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………