Teaching principles of network and agent-based models to architecture students

Architectural design is necessarily a situated learning process that continues to be a subject of interest in architectural education. Whether designers should give preference to a functional design product or whether the focus should be centered on creative output are issues that need to be questioned. Given the typically vague descriptions of creativity it is even harder to determine whether design functionality and design creativity should be treated as separate entities. The implications of any preferences made on the methods of assessment are crucial. While teaching is necessarily aligned to design as an experiential learning process, it also requires careful understanding of how knowledge can inform rather than constrain creativity. In evaluating the creativity or even the functionality of a design there are challenges present in accounting for a comprehensive and yet practical framework for assessment. In teaching practices the challenge is to ensure that the assessment process is sufficiently specified without limiting creative explorations. It is argued that through exposing design propositions to internal and external criticism, assessing progress becomes less of a challenge. In this course of development 'creativity' is revealed not as value-neutral but as a product of a social process that is practiced through experiential learning