Changing Roles for (Multi)Media Tools in Design - Assessing Developments and Applications of (Multi)Media Techniques in Design Education, Practice and Research

This contribution explores the continued evolvement of the instruments of design in relation to practice and education (and potentially: research) and attempts to characterize the effects brought about by recent media “shifts”. For this purpose a framework has been established to identify and “map” relevant design media. The relationships between various “traditional” media and computer based applications are scrutinized and characterized and the opportunities which they offer are compared. The underlying conceptual framework was recently put before a group of professionals in the in the course of an experimental workshop concerning the potentials of a virtual design media “museum”. In the following step an attempt is made to identify changing media roles, whereby the opportunities of the educational environment - as a “laboratory” for emerging developments - is stressed. Some specific tendencies are identified, notably: the combined application of different sorts of design media, the surfacing of imaginative new working methods inspired by “classic” media techniques and various new ways of escaping the serious limitations of traditional computer interfaces. These developments, making use of various types of computer platforms, may be expected to contribute to more structured - and imaginative - approaches to professional design as well as to architectural education and research