Knowledge of Making

Watch Video

The education at D-ARCH attracts international attention because it pays special attention to the material and its influence on the design.
The teaching project «Material Workshop» has developed a digital platform that promotes independent learning and cooperation among students. The teaching uses the existing material collection of the DARCH and thus builds a bridge between a digital database and physical material samples. The digital teaching platform enriches experimental teaching in the field of material and construction, accompanies the learning process, ensures the gain of knowledge and makes it accessible to others.
Working with the platform holds great potential for process-related applications such as design and project work, but also for applied research within teaching. In the follow-up project «Knowledge of Making», the broad impact is to be significantly increased. To this end, the platform is to be modularly designed in order to open up different learning environments and methods. By introducing structural levels, the various entries are to be visualized externally.
The elective, which will continue to be offered, will guide the development of the new functions and test their use. The versatility of the platform will then be introduced and tested in other learning environments inside and outside the D-ARCH.

Existing platform:
– Design processes can be visualized within the elective and different semester projects can be tracked in the platform.
– The long-term and comprehensive use is already guaranteed by the integration in SARI and the digital slide library.
– The workflow of the platform already enables the simultaneous and secure work of numerous users on the platform.
– The data structure has already been designed in such a way that a modular structure of the platform is possible and can thus react flexibly to different requirements.

Follow-up project:
– The collaborative development and documentation of process-related knowledge represents a great potential, especially in its broad application.
– The modular structure of the platform with its open interfaces supports the connection to other platforms and systems and thus contributes to an open exchange between the fields.
– The Overlay allows to navigate processes across themes and subjects and projects, via materials and tags and people.
– The high level of acceptance among lecturers enables it to be tested and used in various teaching environments and has a potentially broad impact.

For the first time, the platform developed in recent years allows process knowledge to be experienced in an intuitive way and to visualize for later courses.
In contrast to common note programs, but also existing interactive teaching tools, the platform is characterized by a chronological input mode, which is context-related and filterable.

But only the planned stage is supposed to play out the full potential of the teaching platform. The modular structure shall promote teaching in different learning environments and respond to the different teaching methods. The «Overlay» mode shall create a new form of atlas and allow direct access to all entries.