Conversant Immersion: Toward Long-Term Collaboration in the Architectural Engineering Capstone Studio

摘要

Collaboration is a highly valued skill by professionals, yet the way it is most commonly introduced to students may emphasize only short-term impacts. Within a traditional interdisciplinary project, cooperative collaboration is often employed in which students of different disciplines are responsible for contributing their specialized knowledge and approaches to a project. There is some learning and general awareness achieved, but it is difficult to measure whether each student adequately understands all of the material in both the short- and long-terms. To better confirm that material is absorbed more fully for long-term impact, what Oklahoma State does in the Architectural Engineering Capstone Studio and throughout much of our curriculum is based on an expanded idea of the teaching technique of role-playing. The phrase that better describes our process is conversant immersion that emphasizes depth and breadth of the design process. In the conversant immersion process of the Capstone Studio, the students must not only design and analyze structure for a building but also they must individually do the architectural design of the building. In addition, they design and calculate elements of the mechanical system, lighting system, and envelope system. All of these systems are integrated, and decisions made in the design of one system usually impact another. Why have the students go through this effort? The faculty has surveyed professionals who hire our graduates and our alumni, and they report that this immersion makes graduates better collaborators in the long-term. This paper proposal will outline for educators in architecture and architectural engineering schools what is done during the Capstone Studio semester, reveal the project results of this process, and share the responses of professionals who have experienced the studio or employed OSU graduates.