Designing for Difference: The Service Learning Studio ©

Reprinted with author's permission. Initially published in Architecture Reading Lists and Course Outlines volume 4, Georgia Bizios, Ed., Eno River Press, Chapel Hill, NC (1998, pp. 100-105)

Leslie Kanes Weisman, Assoc. AIA
Professor of Architecture
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Newark, New Jersey, USA

Abstract

Designing for Difference is a service learning studio dedicated to encouraging architecture students to become socially responsible professionals by working on real design projects for local non-profit organizations involved in restoring the environment and improving peoples' lives. These organizations typically serve constituencies who are disenfranchised, disadvantaged, socially marginalized or traditionally under served or unserved by architects, such as people who are homeless, poor, chemically dependent, victims of violence, racially and ethnically diverse, disabled, old, frail, ill, women, and children. The studio is financially supported by a state grant administered by the NJIT Office of Community and Public Service, earmarked to support innovative educational models that integrate service learning into academic programs in New Jersey's colleges and universities. Students are given a "first-hand" introduction to writing and designing with architectural programs in collaboration with "clients" and "expert users," and to the social, political, legal, and economic contexts that shape the design and development of buildings and architectural settings. "Clients" and projects change each semester the studio is offered.

Place of the Program in the Curriculum

The course is an elective vertical design studio available to fourth and fifth year architecture students matriculating in a five year Bachelor of Architecture degree program. The placement of the studio at the upper level ensures that students possess both the basic requisite design and communication skills and level of maturity needed to confront their own personal biases about "clients" and user groups who are often associated with negative cultural stereotypes.

The Educational Goals

Society is becoming increasingly multicultural and ecologically responsible. There is a growing realization that the politics of human and environmental exploitation that defined the 20th century must be replaced in the coming decades with an ethic of interdependence that values and celebrates human diversity and acknowledges humanity's debt to the earth. If architects are to effectively contribute to this future, architectural education must undergo creative change. Conventional professional boundaries must be re-examined. Architectural students, educators, and practitioners must learn to solve problems in interdisciplinary teams with experts in natural resource conservation, economics, politics, art, medicine, behavioral and social sciences, law, and engineering. They must learn to work in innovative partnerships with non-profit and culturally diverse groups. Architecture must become a research-oriented profession that embraces public policy, global markets, and sustainable design technologies.

The primary goal of "Designing for Difference" is to build this knowledge-base and develop these skills and capacities within students. The studio is designed as an antidote to architecture's historic tradition as an elitist profession, dominated by white males, that serves only those who can afford the fees. Additional goals include fostering a sensitivity to "others" through breaking down the traditional barriers between student and teacher, client and professional; raising the self-confidence of students in their own abilities to meet the challenges of the "real world;" and most importantly, teaching students that being an architect -- with all the technological and formal demands the role involves -- and working for social justice and a sustainable future do not have to be at odds.

Teaching Strategies

Four educational principles serve as cornerstones for the structure, form and content of the studio. Each is derived from feminist pedagogy, with its attention to collective processes, redefining power relationships, deconstructing false dichotomies (for example between women and men, black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight etc.), and eliminating inequities in gender, race, class, disability status, and sexual orientation.

First, employ collaborative learning in which interdependent, team problem solving and co-creativity are practiced and rewarded over competitive, solitary problem solving and individual creativity. This requires re conceptualizing and valuing the different roles and contributions of individuals within a collective design process, without obliterating or devaluing individual identities and creativity.

Second, teachers must share their authority and question their monopoly over knowledge so that students are empowered to direct their own learning, and so that people in other disciplines and with different life experiences can join in the learning process. The boundaries of the problem to be solved, not the boundaries of a single academic discipline, should determine what knowledge is needed and where it can best be found.

Third, emphasize ethical values, a respect for human diversity, and interconnectedness among all of humanity, the natural world, and the products of human design. When we design, we effect the lives of others through our decisions. When students discover they are accountable to others as designers, they begin to design in an empathic mode, entering into people's plights and identifying with their concerns. They are summoned to compassionate action in which they seek to empower others through their work, rather than merely imposing their own images upon the world.

Fourth, eliminate false dichotomies by creating learning situations that connect academic theory with applied practice and by establishing collaborative relationships among designers, clients and user groups. The best motivation for doing research is the need to have it in order to solve the problem; the best way to teach students about human difference is to involve them with people who are different from themselves.

The following description of a "Designing for Difference" studio project illustrates the application of these pedagogic principles.

"DESIGNING FOR DIFFERENCE: AN AIDS EDUCATION"

The "AIDS Education" studio, which I organized and taught in the Spring term of 1992 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, was dedicated to developing new housing and related services for families facing the challenge of HIV/AIDS. To date there is little existing housing available for children with HIV/AIDS that also provides health care, social services and shelter for their mothers. The need for family housing is especially urgent in New Jersey where the HIV/AIDS epidemic wears the face of a woman or an infant more than anywhere else in the country. In 1989, women comprised 21% and infants another 3% of all people with AIDS in the state. Five of the 25 communities in the United States with the largest number of pediatric AIDS cases were in New Jersey. In Newark, one baby in 63 tested HIV positive; in Jersey City the figure was one in 79.*

The majority of New Jersey's women and children with HIV/AIDS are poor, urban, African American, and Hispanic. Often infected children live with their mothers and other infected or healthy children and adults in deplorably substandard housing. Many of the mothers become severely depressed in having to cope with their poverty and their own fatal illness as well as their children's. Frequently, children with HIV/AIDS do not have families to care for them; their mothers may be active drug users or prostitutes, homeless, or ill or dead as a result of AIDS.

Two pioneering Newark-based organizations served as "clients" for our "Designing for Difference: An AIDS Education" studio: The Children's Hospital AIDS Program (CHAP) of the United Hospitals Medical Center, and the AIDS Resource Foundation for Children (ARFC), sponsors of transitional foster care housing for children with HIV/AIDS. Our "clients" used the architectural programs, site selection criteria, and design schemes we produced to attract the financial, political, and community support needed to actually build new facilities of this type in Newark's central ward.

The studio began with an assessment by each student of their individual educational goals, concerns, skills, and interests. This information was used to develop different task-oriented student teams whose members rotated so that each student could offer their greatest strengths to our collective work, while, at the same time, tutoring others who had expressed an interest and/or need to improve themselves relative to the task at hand. Students developed group criteria for evaluating their own and each other's contributions to the research phase of the studio which included an extensive literature search, lectures from medical and social service experts in HIV/AIDS treatment, and case studies of and site visits to several existing housing and medical facilities for PWA's (people with AIDS). (The two most important evaluative criteria were the degree to which the research presented was useful in "solving" our studio problem, and the potential it held for educating others beyond the studio). We continued with programming, developed through combining our research with numerous interviews conducted by student teams with our "clients," their staffs and the families they serve. Programming concluded with an exploration by each student of the personal, philosophical, and social meanings they associated with this project. Using imagery, poetry and essays, I asked them to answer several difficult questions: "What is a family?" "What does home mean?" "What are the characteristics of an institution?" "How do you feel about death and where do these feelings come from?" and finally, "In the face of this ravaging disease, what can your design do to possibly ease the suffering of people with HIV/AIDS and their loved ones?" The answers became the conceptual underpinnings for students' design solutions.

Developing site criteria, finding appropriate building sites, and presenting them to our clients included an evaluation of the ownership and cost of potential properties, proximity to needed support services and public transportation, existing zoning regulations and building codes, and an assessment of the anticipated level of community resistance or acceptance of a facility for PWA's. Like the authorship of the programs, site analysis was collaboratively developed by all the students.

During the design phase of the studio, students worked individually on their own projects. Seven students developed schemes for the Aids Resource Foundation for Children, whose program called for a 23,000 square foot building containing congregate housing for 6 homeless families (defined as women and children); a community center for residents and other families with HIV/AIDS; and a thrift store where clothes donated to ARFC could be refurbished and sold to the local community.

The other seven students in the studio developed schemes for the Children's Hospital AIDS Program whose proposed 32,000 square foot building would contain housing for 8 to 10 families and 5 to 7 HIV/AIDS infected adolescents; a daycare center for children with HIV/AIDS; a community/social service center; and residential and community gardens.

Schematic design began with a series of three-dimensional "parti collages" in which major programmatic components such as daycare, residential, administrative, on-site parking and so on, were color coded and arranged on the site at 1/32" scale in a series of studies that explored how various parts of the building could be formally assembled to express each student's personal and philosophical goals for their project. Throughout the design process, the clients and users were consulted regularly. The students frequently formed their own juries for peer reviews. Experts in environmental psychology, lighting and interior design, healthcare design, environmental control systems, universal design and assisted living housing served as "visiting desk critics," and met by appointment with various student teams to collaborate as design problems and questions arose.

Assessment of Student Work

I view service learning as a form of social activism that links rigorous academic content in the classroom with "hands-on" experiential learning in the field, thereby "placing" intellectual knowledge within the powerful framework of personal meaning. It is my belief that the value inherent in such an education is in its ability to create social change through the personal transformation of those it educates. One student, an Asian-American female, writing to me about the "AIDS Education" studio described above, almost a year after she had graduated, put it this way:

When we students enrolled in your studio, we knew it promised to be unlike any other. None of us realized then how much it would affect our lives. Other studios had stressed formal, theoretical projects that rarely had to do with real clients, users or problems. We had to wait four and a half years, until in our final semester of college when we got to deal with what is most important about being an architect -- people and making a difference in someone's life through architecture. It was worth the wait! In our studio, the goal was not the usual personal competition and gain, but rather a collaboration among students and a teacher who truly cared about a greater goal, that of advancing what we as designers could do to help those in need.

While an assessment of the "architectural artifacts" produced in the Designing for Difference" studio is important, there are other measures for evaluating "success" that are more important, since the course is based upon an educational model of personal empowerment and interdependent collaboration. At the end of the semester, I give each student a lengthy self-evaluation form that they are required to fill out as thoughtfully, objectively, and thoroughly as possible, so that they can participate as a "partner" in the grading process. I also fill out the same form for each student. They are averaged together, along with the evaluations of their work made by other students throughout the semester (referred to in the description of "An AIDS Education") to determine their final course grade. The following sorts of questions are typically asked for each of the "phases" of the studio (research, programming, and design):

• Describe your specific involvement in any/all of the following activities, including approximate hours:
  • work performed on teams such as model making, drawing, photography, measuring the site, programming
  • library research
  • preparing for verbal presentations
  • writing
  • meeting with the client and/or other studio consultants
  • purchasing materials for the class
  • organizing class members to perform tasks
• What did you learn most from the _____ phase of our studio?
• What was the most problematic/ least successful aspect(s) of the ___ phase?
• How would you explain and rate your contribution during the ____ phase relative to other students? (exceeded, successfully met, partially met, did not meet the general level of participation)
• How well have you met the personal goals you set for yourself in the self-assessment you filled out at the beginning of the semester?

• Rank (4-1) and comment upon the quality of your own educational development in each of the phases of our studio.

• Rank and comment upon your overall studio participation.

• What studio grade do you think you should receive and why?

• Is there anyone you would like to especially commend for their outstanding contribution(s) to the ____ phase of our studio? If yes, who and why?

Students are also asked to fill out a course evaluation that I prepare to help me assess my own performance and their perceptions of the educational value of each aspect of the studio. While this process is very time consuming for all of us, it is ultimately far more meaningful and fosters an accountability that is essential for the creation of an environment of mutual trust and respect.

Concluding Comments: A Caveat

Organizing and teaching interdisciplinary service learning studios is very labor intensive, and requires unusual skill in group dynamics, arbitration and conflict resolution, coordination, and scheduling. Finding appropriate "clients" and consultants who are willing to donate their time and expertise to the students' education is difficult. While we are committed to providing useful pro bono architectural services to our "clients," a university is not a welfare agency set up to solve social problems. Doing good must always serve education first. In addition, to mix service with syllabus, a teacher must be flexible. They must be capable of suspending their judgment, changing their expectations, altering their requirements, and adjusting their due dates, so that students, "clients," and unpredictable events -- from bad weather to organizational politics -- shape the outcomes, as they do in "real" life.

Sometimes, faculty who are associated with advocacy projects are criticized for neglecting the formal dimensions of architecture. Given the ambitious multiple agendas and demands of service learning studios, it is true that the time allotted to designing during the one semester duration of such a studio course is often shortened, which can be a source of real frustration for students and teachers. However, the blame, if any, resides within the constraints of a traditional curriculum whose structure does not support holistic, experiential learning, and not with the priorities of the faculty who implement such pedagogy.

*statistics were taken from Richard Conviser, Ph.D., Generations in Jeopardy, Responding to HIV Infection in Children, Women , and Adolescents in New Jersey, a report from the New Jersey Pediatric AIDS Advisory Committee to the New Jersey Commissioner of Health, funded by the New Jersey Department of Health, September 1989.

Leslie Kanes Weisman is Professor and former Associate Dean of Architecture at New Jersey Institute of Technology. She is the recipient of the NJIT Excellence in Teaching Award (1990) and the ACSA Creative Achievement Award (1994); the author of Discrimination by Design, a Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment (1992); and co-editor of The Sex of Architecture (1996).

For further information contact: weisman@norfolk.com

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Citation: Weisman, Leslie Kanes (1998). Designing for Difference: The Service Learning Studio. © Architecture Reading Lists and Course Outlines, Volume 4, pp. 100-105 Chapel Hill: Eno River Press. Retrieved (Enter Date), from Universal Design Education Online web site: http://www.udeducation.org/teach/course_outlines/courses_infused/weisman.asp