Computer-Aided Architectural Design Teaching: a design oriented post-grad experience

CAAD education methods are often system-oriented. Software choices have an important role to play in this trend. However, teaching methods must also be taken into consideration. An increasing emphasis has been placed on design-oriented teaching approaches in the last twenty years. By this we mean teaching methods aiming the application area in which computers are to be used, rather than the system’s structures or computer underlying paradigms. The results are mostly courses within programmes adopting design-oriented teaching methods. However, the growing interest in this approach has rarely affected CAAD teaching programmes as a whole. A glance at the syllabus of some CAAD programmes may reveal their system-oriented nature. We describe here a post-graduate programme that has been structured under a design-oriented approach through a set of courses in which the emphasis falls on the application in the architectural design process rather them on the software paradigms or categories