Speakers
Description
The Basic Design Studio in Urban and Regional Planning education is designed as a means of developing creative thinking and spatial perception by considering design in the context of conceptual relationships. In this process, it is aimed to develop students' spatial thinking skills by deepening the basic components of design from an interdisciplinary field such as planning/architecture/art/philosophy/sociology. Human-induced environmental disasters along with global climate change, which we see the impact of from daily life to macro level planning decisions, require us to put innovative approaches to urban life on our agenda. From streets to urban infrastructures, it is important to adopt visionary approaches to urban planning that are more equitable, sustainable, resilient and developed in dialog. In this context, the basic design education developed through art and design disciplines has been reconstructed for urban planning students within the scope of the studio and transformed into a pedagogical framework that enables them to increase their spatial literacy, develop creative problem solving skills, gain collaborative practice and think critically about urban constructs.
Starting from the point and expanding towards the city, the basic design education process includes not only two-dimensional and three-dimensional productions on objects, concepts, events and facts, time, and space but also performances and new media productions. In this context, urban spaces become a part of the studio and turn into productions such as drawing, mapping, model, installation, video, performance together with qualitative and quantitative spatial research methods. This process, together with basic design education, strengthens students' perception of space and the city, while at the same time developing their critical thinking along with creative production techniques. In this context, during the studio process, students are expected to make productions in line with basic design principles, while at the same time they are expected to develop speculations about the temporal-spatial arrangements we live in with the words/concepts given to them. Referring to Donna Haraway's (1997) concept of “worlding”, this article aims to produce new narratives, question existing categories, and explore ways to achieve the current transformation through both discursive and spatial practices.
Within the scope of the study, the research modules developed in the basic design studio between 2022-2025 on the themes of “nomadism” (2022-2023), “utopia/dystopia” (2023-2024), “symbiosis” (2024-2025) will be explained as a case study. The conceptual construction of these study modules goes through research and design processes that mediate the questioning of the possibility of another world. Here, first of all, it is aimed to shake the canonical discursive-spatial configuration in studies ranging from fictional literary narratives to research on local communities. Then a storybook is written in collaboration with a human-non-human character to construct a new narrative of place. With this new narrative, people, animals, plants, objects, various natural phenomena, etc. mediate the production of place. As an important part of this process, designing wearable structures or prosthetics related to the scenarios they have created. A collaborative object in the narrative, as a prosthesis integrated into the human body, rejoins the existing world as a “cyborg” (Haraway, 1985). This process continues with the reproduction of an alternative spatial narrative of a specific urban area in Istanbul, accompanied by models and performances.
This methodology offers an urban space-oriented design process that encourages students to engage critically-creatively with the built environment. Through the case study, this paper situates “worlding” as a pedagogical model for the possibility of other worlds within creative production processes, while at the same time emphasizing the creative and critical potential of basic design. Finally, an evaluation is presented on the potential of this methodology to reshape the relationship between design education and urban planning practices.
References
Haraway, D. J. (1985) 'A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s', Socialist Review, 80, pp. 65-108.
Haraway, D. J. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and technoscience. London: Routledge.
| Keywords | Urban planning education; Basic Design; Worlding; Critical spatial thinking |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
