Responsible Design - an experiment in collaboration

The imminent impact of the climate change has forced architecture schools to rethink their pedagogic structures. Using a scaffolded approach in our new MArch studio, we can demonstrate that the multiple narratives are required to deliver a responsive building capable of being durable, resilient and flexible. We argue that understanding these intertwined narratives is an essential method in dealing with the dynamic character of a building under construction, in use and reuse. The paper plots the structured narrative in a necessary linear fashion, where each phase employs specific methods of enquiry to deliver quantitative data that supports evidenced design decisions. However measurement is not everything, because the student teams must find a way of balancing the objective with the qualitative. The studio remains an open looped learning paradigm where the students are encouraged to reflect on the processes to build for themselves a leadership and decision model for future practice. This is an iterative cyclical model where invention, crisis and paradigm shift are built in. Through learning histories (both shared and personal), through storytelling (Roth & Kleiner, 1998), the story of the MArch Collaborative Studio at TU Dublin is revealed