Introducing circularity in early architectural design education
Abstract
Purpose
With around 40% of global waste attributed to the built environment sector, architects play a significant role in how resources are consumed, produced and wasted. UK architectural educators have made good progress to embed climate emergency issues in design curricula but the challenges of resource use and waste, and the opportunities afforded by circular economy design principles are less well-considered. The purpose of this paper is to provide new insights on how to introduce circular design principles to early-stage architectural design students within university curricula.
Design/methodology/approach
The study described took an experimental approach to designing design project briefs across several interlinked studio design projects for 1st-year Architecture students. Structured as a case study, each section describes the project, learning objectives, teaching methods and project reflections informed by a qualitative assessment of student development, outputs and feedback gathered through a questionnaire and focus group.
Findings
Introducing circular design early is highly beneficial to the development of knowledge on sustainability issues, critical design thinking and creative solution generation. Examples of beneficial teaching approaches include building systems thinking, facilitating collaboration, supporting learning-through-making, using simple analogies and referencing best-practice examples.
Originality/value
This research builds on limited existing circular design literature for built environment fields and through practical insights fills a significant knowledge gap on ways to introduce a complex and dynamic topic such as the circular economy to early-stage architectural design students as they develop fundamental discipline-specific knowledge, skills and competences.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the students and supporting staff for their engagement in the semester of projects described in this paper. Further thanks to Don Duncan for their involvement in planning and executing the Co-Lab project. For the Making Together project, we are grateful for the contributions from Welig Heritage Crafts, Jump the Hedges, ASTRL Fibres, OGU Architects and Rachel Fitzpatrick Design. We also appreciate the support of the Re-Wind research project for the donating 3D models and a wind turbine blade section. Materials and external teaching time was funded, with thanks, from the Northern Ireland Department for Education.
Our team was awarded £3,400 through an internal university fund supported by Northern Ireland's Department for Education. This fund was to support education projects that specifically address academic readiness, practical skills and curriculum knowledge in the context of supporting the transition to higher education during the pandemic.
The research questionnaire and focus group questions were reviewed and approved by the Queen's University Engineering and Physical Sciences Faculty Research Ethics Committee in accordance with the Proportionate Review process.
Citation
Campbell, E., Niblock, C., Flood, N. and Lappin, S. (2024), "Introducing circularity in early architectural design education", Archnet-IJAR, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/ARCH-03-2024-0094
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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