UO Conferences & Symposia

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Open Access
Academic Urban Labs: Architectural design studios to address local challenges
(University of Oregon, 2019) Delpino-Chamy, Montserrat; Rivera, María Isabel; Alarcon, Mabel
Considering the complexity of ecological and social challenges, universities and the teaching of architecture offer a unique opportunity to create real-life design problems from their local communities, thereby engaging their students in the learning process. On this context, this paper presents the idea of Academic Urban Laboratories as a methodology to enhancing regional development as well as to betterprepare students for professional careers, exposing them to the benefits of holistic, integrated design outcomes. This paper offers a review of the main challenges that the teaching of architecture currently faces, followed by a review of emerging frameworks to improve pedagogical methodologies in this discipline. A rubric to assess Academic Urban Labs’ experiences is presented, which has been applied to the analysis of three architecture design studios experiences, addressing the following connections: elective course and local community, studio and local government, studio and international congress. Finally, the main reflections are related to examining the link between academic and local stakeholders, assessing strategies to increase the efficiency of sustainable outcomes, and reducing the time demand on the management processes to support this methodology. From the results, it is possible to identify an increase in social responsibility, as well as a commitment among students towards more sustainable development, thus supporting the idea of designing new learning experiences connecting academia with real-life problems.
Open Access
Auditing Accessibility Through Remote User Testing
(2022-01-27) Burmeister, Nora; Walston, Felicity
When COVID-19 hit, many UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries employees needed remote tasks. The UX department saw an opportunity for these employees to perform remote accessibility testing of subscription e-resources with freely available digital accessibility evaluation tools. We will outline the procedures, outcomes, and next steps of this accessibility audit.
Open Access
Beyond Sustainability: Architectural Education in an Ever-Changing Climate
(University of Oregon, 2019) Raab, Peter S.
Within a rapidly changing climate, never have humans seen such rampant degradation of their environment. From water shortages and over-population to massive flooding and storms, we are beginning to test strategies of resilience at the urban and architectural scale. With the scientific evidence of our warming climate system being unequivocal, design professionals must be cognizant of the impact of these changes on theory, pedagogy, and practice. An integrated and resilient approach to ecological design of buildings, landscapes and communities within this changing climate is imperative. Too often we teach students to look solely at technological means as the solution to our ailing building design, however it is important to understand precise constraints of climate to produce rigorous design solutions. This starts with a knowledge of larger environmental systems. This paper will outline a three-pronged approach recently employed to ensure undergraduate design students grasp larger frameworks impacting the future of architectural practice within the Anthropocene. Using varied modes of interrogation, students are required to delve more deeply into a series of analytical exercises developed collaboratively to elicit thoughtful, appropriate and responsible massing, orientation and material strategies throughout the sequence. By designing an extensive framework beyond the simplistic, superficial separatism of modernism, the designer is enabled to understand architecture as in an open-exchange with the larger bioclimatic, social and ecological worlds.
Open Access
A BIM-enabled pedagogical approach
(University of Oregon, 2019) Ming, Hu
Educators and practitioners have come to the consensus that Building Information Modeling (BIM) has radically transformed how the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry practices and operates. The move from using traditional Drafting-based Modeling(DM) to BIM constitutes a new methodology rather than the simple introduction of a new tool. BIM has already become mainstream in practice. But there is limited number of publications that addressed how this critical development can be used effectively in higher education. The critical research goal of this study is to document a method of using BIM as an effective pedagogy to teach a large, mixed- level technology course. A BIM-enabled pedagogy (BEP) was developed and tested in a “Building Materials and Construction Methods” (BMCM) class to compare with traditional Drafting-based Modeling pedagogy (DMP). The preliminary results demonstrated that BEP is more effective than DMP for teaching technology courses in an architecture curriculum. The aims of this research are as follows: 1) introduce an integrated, BIM-enabled pedagogy in the BMCM course; 2) identify applicable BIM-based techniques useful in architectural education; and 3) present some interesting findings regarding the effectiveness of this pedagogy for students at different levels. In the end, the pedagogical approach is discussed, and further research tasks are identified.
Open Access
Building Knowledge
(University of Oregon, 2019) Correa, David; Meyboom, AnnaLisa; Krieg, Oliver David
Material characteristic and fabrication methodologies informing design processes are a growing focus of research and pedagogy. Bio-mimetics, morphogenetics or material computation theories have mostly been used as integrative tools within their teaching methods. The authors of this paper have observed that these pedagogical models are most successful when they are coupled with a practical understanding of the tools and processes that are engaged in architectural production. Without this exchange, a growing disconnect emerges between the concept and the crafted artifact, leading to unfounded speculative projections rather than true applied understanding. As such, experimentation with tools and materials is essential for students to build knowledge on the constraints and possibilities that exist within a material or manufacturing technology. This learning process is not meant to be singular – applying to one material and one fabrication process – but rather a process that is learned and then can further be applied to other design problems. However, the research and development processes are usually too extensive for students to gain in-depth understanding of the methodology - a learning experience that is beyond the scope of a single architecture studio. Through a set of intensive fabrication workshops, carried out by the authors, a targeted pedagogical model is aimed at knowledge creation within a compressed framework. Engaging participants to a particular point in the building process - that point at which a design is materialized through fabrication processes - provides a unique platform to shift from exploratory conceptualization to technically informed hands-on implementation.
Open Access
BUILDING THE CURVE: STRUCTURING STUDIO EDUCATION AS INTERACTIVE INCLUSION RATHER THAN CHARRETTE
(University of Oregon, 2019) Koester, Robert J.
The challenge of design-for-sustainability is to balance the need to educate about design process as an intelligent discipline while using the content of social, economic and environmental factors as the space of design decision-making. The legacy of studio education as a tutorial enterprise has for decades built upon the service delivery sequences used in professional practice; pre-design, programming, site selection and analysis, schematic design, design development, construction documentation, construction observation; with only occasional post occupancy evaluation. Design-for-sustainability, however, must operate on a less sequential delivery model; employing instead a “breathing in and breathing out” functionality of parallel processing unique to the trial and error nature of the design process itself. Fundamentally, design is an inefficient iterative process, an aspirational enterprise, and a willfully integrative act. But that integration must have multiple moorings. Moreover, we must abandon the charrette model in favor of "building the curve" of inclusion, integrating the multiplicities within the design-decision space over time by using a rhythmic sequencing of exploration and reflection; namely, the Blue Dot technique of scripting/scheduling the activity of design exploration, introduction and application; wherein every design project becomes a form of adaptive reuse. This presentation will share student work developed over a decade of application of the Blue Dot methodology to show highly integrative design-for-sustainability projects; as products of the intelligent balance of process and content education.
Open Access
Choosing Colors
(2022-01-27) Sattler, Kelly
Color is an important part of branding. Color contrast is important for accessibility. This presentation will cover a few essential tools that can be used to verify color contrast to pass WCAG standards as well as tools that can be used to tweak colors and create pleasing color palettes.
Open Access
Comfort and Efficiency: Strategies to Develop a Climate Appropriate Affordable Home
(University of Oregon, 2019) McGlohn, Emily M.
Alabama’s Blackbelt counties suffer from some of the poorest economic conditions in the country. Thirtytwo percent of all people living there, live in poverty. Affordable and climate appropriate housing that contributes to the well-being of this significantly sized group is lacking, and the challenges are many. Auburn University’s Rural Studio attempts to address this need through the 20K Home Project. This paper focuses on one aspect of this fourteen-year research project: the design strategies of a climate appropriate, affordable home and ways to teach students to prioritize options. Within the larger 20K Home Project, third-year architecture students at Rural Studio build one house a year. They start with the plans of a previously designed home from the project. They inherit the strategies and details from another group of students. To understand the house, they analyze the conceptual and tangible aspects of the design. Learning how to prioritize and select from the ever-growing number of ways to structure, enclose, insulate, heat, and cool a home, while minding the climatic characteristics of hot-humid Alabama is the objective. Making informed adjustments to the existing strategies and building a house to test their selections is the goal. This paper is a case study of the 2017-18 Rural Studio third year project house and addresses the pedagogical approach for this process.
Open Access
Computational Design Thinking and Thinking Design Computing
(University of Oregon, 2019) Soleimani, Arash
In alignment with the rapid advancement of cyber-physical technologies in an information age, we are faced with complex problems that go beyond the kinds of challenges that designers had to deal with in the past. For many of these challenges we do not have established theories, methods, or tools to solve the problems. Therefore, it is critical for architects to not only have expertise in established design methods, but also to be able to rapidly and creatively develop new theories, skills, and technologies. This paper seeks to contribute to the core curriculum of architecture programs by exploring opportunities that benefit from advancements in computation as an innovative approach to teaching digital tools. The paper explores how computational thinking can be used in design as a new way of thinking, making, solving problems, and developing techniques and technologies to nurture creative processes, practices, and design outcomes. The paper presents how advancements in technology and computation may change the process of design. Intelligent Design Systems are introduced as a successful example of teaching “Computational Methods” by the author in several architecture schools’ core sequences in the United States. Computational Methods introduces students to computational thinking and fundamental concepts of computation through explorations with generative and analytical technologies. The goal of the course is to explore and elaborate the potential of computation and the role it can play as a part of one’s design process; not as a collection of specific tools, but as a way of thinking about design.
Open Access
Concluding remarks by the Office of the Provost
(2022-10-14) Office of the Provost, University of Oregon
Open Access
Context is Everything: History and Culture in Contemporary Tribal Life
(2005-11-09) Mankiller, Wilma Pearl, 1945-
Wilma Mankiller, twenty-fifth occupant of the Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics, presented a public lecture on Wednesday, November 9, in the EMU Ballroom. Mankiller is an author, activist, and former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.
Open Access
Creativity, Calculation, & Curation: Research as a Framework for Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration
(University of Oregon, 2019) Laboy, Michelle; Fannon, David
Challenges of building resilience and sustainability in the built environment demand collaboration across multiple disciplines in both research and practice. Traditional academic settings offer fertile but often challenging context in which research faculty can foster interdisciplinary collaboration informed by and contributing to new and more integrated knowledge. This paper presents an example of such a crosscurricular collaboration occurring through qualitative case study research, quantitative analysis, comparison, and communication design culminating in the curation of knowledge in a major public exhibit. Students studying architecture, engineering, art and design are collaborating across multiple courses and semesters to develop the intellectual content, experiential narratives, and physical artifacts that reflect the diverse opportunities and influence of education on the sustainable built environment. Emerging from the faculty’s broader inquiry into the architecture of persistence, this project posits durability of buildings as the ultimate measure of sustainability (and by extension, resilience) in architecture . Using quantitative and qualitative methods, researchers developed a theoretical framework for cultural, ecological and technological durability by analyzing interviews and projects. Six architecture students—who first engaged in the topic in a comprehensive studio—became research assistants documenting and analyzing specific precedents as material assemblies and cultural places. Using the resulting documentation, students in an environmental engineering course conducted whole-building Life Cycle Assessments. This body of quantitative and qualitative content feeds a representation course, in which design students examine the role of exhibitions in architectural discourse and develop narratives and objects that communicate material ecologies, assemblies and cultures to a disciplinary, and nondisciplinary audience.
Open Access
Crisis Brings Connection – Virtual Programming for Older Adults
(2022-01-28) Lensing, Amanda
Connected for Life: Object-based Digital Programming to Foster Active Minds for Senior Living Communities is a project serving a population especially vulnerable to COVID-19 and underserved in outreach and engagement programs. The goal is to increase participants’ sense of connection and well-being and decrease feelings of isolation through accessible technology.
Open Access
Cultural citizenship and labor rights for Oregon farmworkers: The case of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Nordoeste (PCUN)
(2003) Stephen, Lynn
This article uses the story of Oregon's only farmworker union, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), and worker testimonies to illustrate how cultural citizenship has been created for some farmworkers through grassroots organizing around immigration, cultural, and labor issues.
Open Access
CultureWork ; Vol. 09, No. 03
(Institute for Community Arts Studies, Arts & Administration Program, University of Oregon, 2005-03) Congdon, Kristin G.; Hicks, Laurie; Bolin, Paul; Finison, Maria F.
Open Access
Design Integration: Lesson from a Research-Based Design Studio + Seminar
(University of Oregon, 2019) Peña, Robert B.; Meek, Chris
Design Integration can be characterized as a working method that is iterative, continuously collaborative, and information-rich, and is targeted at optimizing the environmental, economic, and experiential performance of a building. Research, information, and application of digital methods that facilitate multivariate analysis are key components of design integration, a demonstrated process in professional practice for creating truly deep-green high-performance buildings such as Seattle’s Bullitt Center. Recognizing the potential for better integration between design and technology in the architecture curriculum at the University of Washington (UW), the Master of Architecture program is transitioning to a new curriculum model aimed at fostering greater collaboration, integration, and a research-based design methodology in design studios and across the curriculum. Underpinning this new curriculum is a greater commitment to research and to parametric analysis using computational methods as active components of the design studio process. This paper reports on the third iteration of an academic and professional collaboration to develop, test and teach computational, performance-based design methods through a studio + seminar model. In each successive version of these courses, methods and technologies have been explored for teaching architecture students to create and document multivariate analysis and design synthesis workflows in an empirically-based design inquiry to develop design proposals for multi-story high performance buildings in downtown Seattle. Here we focus on our most recent studio + seminar course taught during the spring 2019 quarter.
Open Access
Design with Comfort
(University of Oregon, 2019) Cruse, Andrew
As anthropogenic climate change destabilizes a fixed idea of climate, it is also destabilizing a fixed idea of comfort. Comfort, like climate, can no longer be understood as a steady index of energetic balance, but is now recognized as condition of flux on which human activity has a direct impact. In this new context, design with comfort can be an effective extension of earlier directives to design with climate. Design with comfort extends architecture’s immaterial and discursive aspects to bring attention to more a flexible (in terms of temperature) and inclusive (in terms of populations) concept of comfort. Design with comfort seeks to exploit comfort’s latent potential in cultural and aesthetic dimensions. Using comfort to relate climate to construction positions it squarely within architecture culture, and suggests a shared project for a more inclusive group of academics and practitioners. Design with comfort also adds a new aesthetic dimension to creative design practice by actively designing comfort experiences. Today’s dominant comfort model holds that comfort is a static state of thermal neutrality that varies little between different locations, different seasons, and different people. In the context of an architectural studio, designing with comfort asks students to consider how comfort is entangled with more familiar elements of design such as form, materials, program and site. Directly addressing comfort as part of design process helps to demonstrate its historical legacy, establish its currency as part of today’s environmental reality, and encourage students to think creatively about its implications and possibilities.
Open Access
Early, Often, and Iterative: A UX Research Strategy
(2022-01-27) Sistrunk, Hannah
From the perspective of a user experience practitioner on a small digital strategies team at an archival repository, this talk will share the results of the teams’ work to iteratively incorporate user research methods from the earliest stages of a project to build a system for archival discovery and delivery.
Open Access
Educating Design Leaders: The Need for Leadership Education in Schools of Architecture And Proposed Approaches to Meet the Need
(University of Oregon, 2019) Bonnett, Erik
There is a gap in architectural education when preparing future architects for leadership roles. To meet the needs of integrated design processes that frequently situate architects in leadership roles within interdisciplinary teams, more structured, comprehensive, and robust leadership education is needed. Fortunately, experiential leadership education can be effectively integrated into the dominant projectbased structure of architectural education using an iterative approach including strategic instruction, structured feedback, and reflection. Specific gaps in leadership education are identified including: student awareness of current leadership education, competence leading in multiple roles, goal setting and management as a leadership skill, judgement and decision-making, and knowledge of contemporary leadership theory. Strategies and curricula are proposed to support educators seeking to increase the effectiveness of leadership education in their classrooms, studios, and schools of architecture.
Open Access
Environmental Design: moving towards online teaching that encourages action
(University of Oregon, 2019) Martínez Arias, Andrea; La Roche, Pablo
The internet not only has changed a vast spectrum of the world’s operations, but also the ways teaching can deal with information and strategies for learning. While this trend has naturally led to the flexibility of time and location, it is crucial to focus on understanding effective pedagogical strategies with the use of this technology. This paper establishes the thesis that an online setting was effective in teaching both the fundamentals of regenerative studies, while focusing on how undergraduate students learned in this online learning setting. The online coursework and its challenges are discussed along with the structure and methods set to achieve the comprehension of the contents. The urgency for the search of a clear plan and actions to address climate change was the main goal of the class, which was explained in the current political and social context. Consecutively, critical topics of energy, water, shelter, and waste were explored individually, from the main challenges to the design solutions for regeneration. The paper also explains how surveys were a vital tool and an essential instance for feedback. Lessons learned from creating a virtual learning environment that allows for both the grasp of everyone’s role in climate change and the generation of action/plans/solutions for regeneration are discussed, aiming to inform colleagues using a teaching tool that is here to stay.

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