A study on the encounter of the architect and the interior architect through web-based collaborative learning

Abstract

This study focuses how two academic disciplines; architecture and interior architecture, have collaborated on a common project. It discusses educational issues and comments on possible improvement to interdisciplinary work offering design education curriculum recommendations. With the help of rapid developments in information and communication technologies, collaboration between geographically distributed, multidisciplinary teams is becoming standard practice in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. However, in design education students seldom have a chance to collaborate with other disciplines. By integrating information and communication technologies into design studio, encounter of different disciplines can be achieved and this expected to be effective in design curriculum. In this research, students from both disciplines collaboratively designed a Turkish Store in the Netherlands in a virtual design studio environment. Information on encounter of disciplines was obtained via questionnaires and interviews. The results indicate that the similarities of disciplines and the differences in social and cultural contexts provided a rich setting for exploring cross-cultural design collaboration and understanding of interdisciplinary spatial processes in terms of design students. Overlapping boundaries of architecture and interior architecture were perceived by design students and it was an effective experiment for their professional life.