Thinking through digital simulation tasks in architectural education

Abstract

This study reports the activities of 80 second year architecture students at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand for the duration of a single trimester. A central theme in this studio is the framing of day-lighting problems into a quantifiable investigation and then addressing these through the use of digital modelling and simulation tools. This study offers an insight to undergraduate architecture students’ negotiation of digital design spaces and asks the question of how the knowledge of skill-based specialist tasks are extensible to core design studio.The mass education within a University environment of such specialist skill based techniques allows for an insight to the negotiation of quantitative and qualitative design criteria. The issue of learning skill based tasks at university level is a pertinent topic of study as the critique of such techniques is implicit to the holistic education of Architects but the level of this critique can vary greatly. This question also highlights the challenges faced to improving the design education approaches to computational thinking and applications. keywords. Design analysis; daylight simulation; education.