New Studio Territories: Lessons from Hong Kong for seamless digital and physical interactions.

Abstract

In transnational education, and especially architectural programmes, the question of developing positive learning environments while enabling a distinctive architectural school position to emerge has been a constant dialogue with staff and students over the course of the last eighteen months within the Grenfell-Baines Institute of Architecture Hong Kong (GBIA-HK). The course initially offered as a unique part-time, transnational professionally validated course in architecture and from its inception adopted strategies to enable blended online provision with a complementing flying faculty team commuting across two continents. More recently however GBIAHK has needed to respond to both civil disturbances and global health issues, by developing resilient, agile, and positive learning environments for our students and staff.

Various aspects have provided a fertile ground for examining and testing four key themes for online transnational education as a ‘place free’ praxis for education.

The four themes of Act-In-Field, Process-To-Strategy, Construct-A-Journey, Experience-The-Terroire that emerged, can be seen as conditions to the success of positive learning environments, that utilize specific software, and course design strategies meeting our aspiration of creating seamless interactions between physical and digital learning environments.

Students experienced these themes and environments through GBIAHK’s notion of thinking, making, and experiencing architecture through education, aspects that rely on a strong dialogue between peers, staff and positive learning environments, for deep learning across continents, time zones and cultures. These experiences have been an emergent laboratory of experimentation using existing and novel software technologies to enable ‘Digital studios’, and augmented ‘Digital exhibitions’ as the place for education.

Ultimately the project has sort to investigate the qualitative impacts of novel and new technologies adapted to the praxis of architectural education along these four key themes that are supportive to a peer led, positive learning transnational environment, whist providing a structured approach for reflexive educational design in a particular time of flux.