Visual Communication for Students’ Creative Thinking in the Design Studio: Translating Filmic Spaces into Spatial Design
Representing visual experiences is an essential part of architectural design education for creativity. The representation of creative ideas relates to the ability to communicate spatial design concepts. This study examined whether filmic spaces could function as visual communication to enhance students’ creative thinking in architecture. It explored how creativity can be supported throughout an architectural design studio with a conceptual tool that translates filmic spaces into spatial design. To investigate the ways to translate filmic space into spatial design tools for creative thinking, we conducted a design studio with first-year university students. Focusing on using various elements of film, including movement, frame, montage, light, and color, and scene changes to represent architectural languages, a curriculum was developed and implemented in a Visual Communication Design Studio for one semester, stimulating students to engage in expressing their ideas in three-dimensional spaces.
Through exposure to academic offerings at the university, from first- to fifth-year programs, students are given broad access to the tools, strategies, and methodologies that are developed within the university at large. The visual communication class is a single-semester (16 weeks) course, providing a full-time introduction to architecture and design as part of a five-year undergraduate professional degree program in the university. The Visual Communication Design Studio is a place of experimentation and variation to pursue unforeseen opportunities and consequences in terms of architectural representations. The first year could be defined as an adaptation period by a learning-through-making approach; the students thus obtain basic architectural knowledge and the tools and methods that help to foster an exploratory and intellectual interest in the physical and social environment. In the first-year course, three individual studios were developed to encourage students to take a disparate range of approaches and techniques for the purpose of multiplicity, which discourages and disrupts the formation of a singular design methodology. This challenge required each student to proactively seek discussions to inform their work, establish the skills necessary to communicate ideas, and actively challenge their approaches by working individually within studio projects.
Throughout the semester, the students were required to navigate a series of projects that generated a debate and confronted ambiguous definitions of architectural practice. The program was designed in accordance with the accreditation standards of the procedures and conditions of the Korea Architecture Accreditation Board (KAAB). The Korea Institute of Architecture Education Accreditation specifies the core competencies that each university/graduate architecture education program must meet to obtain KAAB certification, and its corresponding student performance criteria (SPC). Out of the 26 criteria of SPC, the Visual Communication Design Studio set its curriculum centered on five criteria.
