Hey Shad,

As broad as this topic can be...this is actually something very similar to what I am looking into as well. "Technology" is being used and branched out in many respective fields (for both good and bad reasons). I am curious to see your results and findings.

Well it all really started with the issue of architectural replication and branding. I began to dive a little deeper into the issue and began to examine the way an architect designs. I have been working in a firm environment for the past year or so, so i have had an opportunity to explore the differences between education and profession prior to the present moment where its all culminating in the form of my thesis. A lot of people complain about the distances between the two different scenarios but a lot of people fail to see some striking similarities (good and bad).

One of my favorite quotes came from the book "Re-fabricating Architecture" by Kieran and Timberlake that states, " The extreme marketing and mass production of an artifact leads to a common recognizability and an expected value. The artifact transcends art and commodity to become solely a product, reducing the architect/designer to a mere stylist."

This suggests that we are facing an issue that is beginning to redefine to role of the architect and arguably technology has lent a hand in this process. It an interesting concept to suggest that we have become stylists, merely taking what we already have and rearranging it for other clients, to the extent that most clients know what they are getting before they even sign a contract. We work in an environment where we sell our past work as options for or new work.  As unnerving as this may be i wasn't so much concerned with placing blame on architects as i was intrigued as to how we begin to design in this methodology.   

I traced this back through our educational system with the idea that if we do practice like this, then at some point in time we must have learned how to practice like this. The idea of the survey above  was to get a broad understanding of technology usage by students, how they use technology in research and design, and what consequences it has on the adaptation into the professional world. Of the responses I've received its incredible that students say 90-95 percent of research and design is done on a computer. I personally see nothing wrong with a computer based design, as the constraints of  program usage  are expanding and this method is not as limiting any longer. The problem i have is with researching or finding precedent online.

In the first two years of school (particularly where i currently study) we learn creative means. So essentially minimal technology, we paint, we sketch, we craft, we even mold clay, etc etc. And this is meant to get us thinking about form, and how space is created in forms and how to creatively problem solve. However when we hit third year, that all kind of gets thrown out a window and for the remainder of vertical studios we are dependent on digital research.

Take for example a typical studio, the beginning phase of a design process is rooted heavily in precedent. But digital precedent is nothing more than a digital representation of the real thing. When we are asked to extract data from that representation, we are arbitrarily extracting what our eye sees and associating a general connotation to it. There is no first hand experience to what we design.  No tactility, no emotion, and no subjectivity.

In the early stages of my research i distinguished between education of knowledge and education of experience. The difference is exactly what i pointed out with the idea of digital precedent. Knowledge is a fact based way of learning, we find factual elements and need not understand them because we know that they have been proven before and it can continue to be replicated. It is essentially a objective, scientific route through education. Experience however, is method in which we learn from interacting, seeing, smelling, touching, etc etc. Its our reactions, our emotions, and our own thoughts that teach us,not arbitrary decision making.  We are a subject of our surroundings and what each person perceives is completely different. This is the more subjective way we learn, our culture mixed with our history, mixed with the surroundings, teaches us.  

So as i look into technology, i see it as a knowledge based system of learning. We learn how to objectively design from representations. The very root of our architectural education is already polluted with making copies before we even understand fully what we are doing. We are essentially trained to replicate and brand. 

My thesis is about resurrecting the idea of education through experience, in the form of learning through human interaction. A concept that relies heavily on the idea that the people who know their surroundings best are the people that live in the surroundings and experience them everyday. So im currently looking into how education can link back to a community. What happens when students design for real people, with real problems, and learn first hand to deal with those people in the environment they live in.  For example: Anybody can design a homless shelter, but how many first consult the needs of the HOMELESS PERSON, not the person funding and not a precedent. The idea is to make individualized and custom work for each thing we design, and the route to that is through an increase of human interaction, learn from those that know reality best - not from a representation of reality.