Computation and Learning Partnerships: Lessons from Wood Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Integration

Mariapaola Riggio,Nancy Yen-Wen Cheng

doi:10.3390/educsci11030124

Abstract

Examining an interdisciplinary university course for architecture, wood science, and engineering students, this paper studies how the students’ ability to master digital workflows influenced their success in learning collaborative design skills. It highlights potential challenges and opportunities posed by the introduction of new digital tools to support emerging integrated building design in both education and professional practice. The particular course focuses on the wood industry, which is rapidly changing from a very traditional to a highly innovative sector and increasingly embracing the latest technological developments in computational design, simulation, and digital fabrication. This study explores the influence of parametric design on collaboration dynamics and workflow within an interdisciplinary group of students embodying the roles of manufacturer, engineer, and architect. Student-generated data of the first three years of the class is analyzed thematically to find correlations with productive collaborations. Focusing on a stage of an evolving teaching and learning process, this analysis allows identifications of common themes and patterns, suggesting implications for practice and future research. The course highlights the need to integrate data interoperability, collaboration skill-building, and material awareness in contemporary digitally enabled architecture, engineering, and construction education. The lessons learned in this course can be of value to academic programs and professional firms involved in incorporating digital design and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Highlights

Education in the field of built environment and civil engineering disciplines is challenged by the transformative shifts in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry
A higher number of sequential division of tasks at the beginning of the collaboration was due to the fact that many teams started with loosely coordinated brainstorming, which led to an initial design idea
One student in the team would be in charge of developing this idea as the initial parametric model, and they would share the data from the model to other components of the teams

Summary

Introduction

Education in the field of built environment and civil engineering disciplines is challenged by the transformative shifts in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. A demand for tight-knit real-time collaboration is being fueled by the ubiquity of digitalization in all project delivery phases, from early design to fabrication and construction. These changes are contributing to replacing traditional, sequential collaboration models characterized by separate, dependent workflows, with concurrent models. Computational processes and cuttingedge technologies have been finding fertile application in wood construction. Wood machinability makes it an ideal material for numerically controlled and robotic machining, transforming the traditional wood manufacturing industry into a high-tech sector, shifting production from commodities to mass-customized, high-end products (e.g., [3]). As more robust digital representations allow a more sophisticated consideration of architectural problems into performance simulation, the teaching challenge increases

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion