2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

An architectural design course demands a wide range of creative design approaches. To strengthen design concepts, students are encouraged to employ diverse digital tools during their ideation process. Traditional methods of representation include sketching, drafting, and modeling that explain the spatial organization and relationships. Although these methods provide an understanding of the design ideas, they cannot provide an immersive experience. Digital tools and platforms such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), metaverse, and rapid prototyping help students gain an empirical understanding of space. The recent advancement of VR gear, software, and applications lowered the threshold for designers and readily provides pedagogical options for exploring immersive experiences. The integration of digital tools helps designers quickly manifest a three-dimensional environment and explore various compositional and spatial options. Through this process, the digital tool is transcended beyond a mere visualization tool and becomes a methodology to achieve better design. For the past several years, the author has had the opportunity to integrate various digital tools in architectural design courses to examine the implications of the digital design process. Participating students were introduced to architectural theory and experimented with various design strategies using digital tools. They employed BIM for modeling their designs and translated the designs to VR files for presentation and review sessions. The student viewers were able to use affordable VR gear Google Cardboard to evaluate and conducted peer reviews of the student projects. Furthermore, in the current course, the author is experimenting with VR gear and its applications as an experimental design tool that provides interactive 3-dimensional modeling capability in the VR environment. This work-in-progress paper will analyze the use of digital tools in the architectural design process and evaluate the validity of the tools as pedagogical content in an architectural design course.