Prototyping as a learning tool in architectural design

Resumen

The phrase “learning by doing”, attributed to John Dewey, has already turned a hundred years old . In this time, the so-called active education has won by large the pedagogical debate and today experiential learning constitutes one of the pillars of the learning model in all its phases.We know that the cognitive processes involved in learning are based on a constant reorganization and reconstruction of experience. The role of the students as the main agents of their own learning shapes the methodological framework of most of the TLK (Learning and Knowledge Technologies) and most especially PBL (Problem Based Learning).In the field of education in architectural design, the scheme according to which a student responds to a problem stated by a teacher is a limited approach that must be updated. The objective of this communication is the formulation of an active methodological proposal to design learning focused on the combination of work through the manufacture of a prototype and the development a model . The work with these two tools is implemented right from the start and is intended to be continuous throughout the course. This communication compares the specific competences that this methodological practice mobilizes as opposed to apparently similar ones such as the production of maquettes in a Design Studio. While the digital model is a technical system that manages, according to internal norms and external conditions, some information for the elaboration of another, the prototype is a partial physical model of a specific part of the project whose performance sets forth a technical or material resolution of the project.Investigations on Models is the Educational Innovation Project that some of the authors of this communication have developed over seven four-month periods within the frame of Design Studio 7 and Design Studio 8 courses of the Degree in Architecture at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (ETSAM-UPM). Based on these experiences, the spring semester of the 2019-2020 academic year tests and incorporates four stages of prototyping carried out over four months of work by a control group made up of 37 students from ETSAM-UPM (Madrid, Spain) and by 15 students from Feng Chia University (Taichung, Taiwan): Alpha Version Prototype, Rapid Functional Prototype, Beta Version Prototype, and Mock-up. These successive versions range from rapid tests, both material and functional, to the construction of a fragment of the project that establishes a possible relationship between its parts. The goals of working with prototypes will be addressed in order to overcome their ability to create models that 'work' (utilitarianism), incorporating instead prototypes’ ability to shape an idea, discovering its strengths and weaknesses and to identify new strategies to be tackled in the following more complex versions of each prototype. This communication delves into the implementation of a dynamic of successive approaches, which runs away from a process that relies on a closed document which may contain unverified errors, working instead with a sequence of approved prototypes that incorporate the error as a working tool and minimize their final impact on a project.