Virtual Design Studio

Kat Hing Wai and the Electronic Red Line /

Kat Hing Wai and the Electronic Red Line Davis van Bakergem Introduction Value added as knowledge is the essential purpose of a design endeavour, and design quality is dependent on the depth and breadth of the information and knowledge which designers bring to the design problem. No matter what the scale, the design process is inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary. It is rare, if not impossible, for a single mind to seek the problem, reveal interconnections, and propose, critique and refine design ideas. The interdependence of issues is especially apparent in urban design projects in which cross cultural collaborations as well as a broad range of disciplines are frequently required. As the complexities of our natural and social world are revealed, self-conscious intervention into these interrelated, dynamic systems will require co-operative teamwork. The structure of the future design office will meet the challenge for effective team buildingbecoming more horizontally structured around the domain of the problem. The team will be 'it' and its composition will reflect the current understanding and needs of the problem. As the character of the problem is revealed and shifts, the team will reorganize and transform. New developments in electronic media and telecommunications will enable the formation of geographically distributed teams - contributing to the project's progress regardless of location. These virtual organizations will define the design office of the future and its capacity to survive will depend on its ability to bring knowledge to bear on the problem at hand. The Virtual Design Studio has been a precursor to this new mode of working in which several geographically distributed collaborators addressed a single design problem. Linked by Internet to an electronic bulletin board in Vancouver, the participating schools assigned teams of design students the challenge to reconfigure a traditional Chinese walled village with both existing and newly designed houses (see 'Digital Pinup Board - The Story of the Virtual Village Project'). This paper offers observations from the perspective of one site, Washington University, about the virtual design studio and its implications for the future. 26 Virtual Design Studio Participation Geographically distributed and collaborative studios require a deliberate structure and demand a high level of organization. The program called for an intense three-week exercise in which the village housing units would be developed the first week, an urban design plan for the reconfigured village the second week, and final presentation images the third. Demonstrating adaptive capability, the Virtual Design Studio effectively accommodated an unexpected proposal from a newcomer, the Washington University team, who wished to design a single public building. It was agreed that Washington University would break from the original program in order to offer a new dimension to the project. With four schools designing over forty village houses, there was room for one team to address the possibility of introducing a public building or space into the program. With agreement from the team leaders to proceed, a program was developed for a simple open structure which would serve the village both as a public gathering place and as a location for local and remote communications. A major challenge of the program was to develop the reconfigured village in anticipation of bringing it into the twenty-first century where connectivity will be one essential aspect of joining the global village. An open pavilion on a raised platform was developed offering a location for community meetings and for telecommunications activities and equipment. The idea was to think of the pavilion as an electronic gateway to the village. At first simple phone booths might be installed in this communal space, but they could naturally evolve to include video and computer network connections for public access. The proposed structure was a warped roof supported by a colonnade of wood columns over an elevated plane; the essential parti for this pavilion was derived from traditional Chinese structures with similar public-use functions. A parametric model was generated to study the roof form with the degree of warp being the dependent variable (see Plates 16 and 17). The entire village was reconfigured using the existing vernacular houses in conjunction with the studiodeveloped library of houses posted on the bulletin board. The public communications pavilion design was used twice: once near the perimeter wall gate and again adjacent to the ancestral burial room opposite the main gate. The scheme maintained a central axis on the main street and two open spaces off that axis were proposed on opposite sides of the street. A Ghost Story Our ghost story is an...