BIM and Teaching in Architecture: Current thinking and approaches

Increasing use of BIM has represented a continuing shift in traditional assumptions on how we navigate the design process. BIM is affording the student the ability to gain a greater understanding of their design ideas via the exploration of scale, spatial organisation and structure, amongst many other design layers, in increasing levels of detail, at the same point in the design process. Architectural education is at a delayed tipping point where architectural students are increasingly looking towards BIM to streamline their design process drawn by the production of realistic visualisation, but with a lack of knowledge and skill in its application. With a lack of guidance and understanding around the application of BIM, the use of BIM in this manner overlooks the potential of BIM to construct and test virtual simulations of proposed schemes, to support design enquiry. This study examines the design process of architectural students and the interaction between analogue and digital methods used in design. These primary modes of communication, offer the opportunity to query the roles and rules of traditional architectural conventions around ‘problem finding’ and ‘problem solving’, challenging the ‘traditional’ design process examined by pioneers like Bruner (1966) and Schon (1987). These approaches are distilled from the findings of the study and presented as guidance to those teaching in architectural academia to align pedagogic goals to methods of abstraction in this new era of design education reconsidering digital methods in design.