Participants’ Perspectives on Design-Build Experience: A Qualitative Exploration

It has been established by pedagogues that for understanding and applying the knowledge, education must have both abstract and concrete components. In professional degree programs, the abstraction could be achieved through classroom teaching. However, for the longer retention of the acquired knowledge and contextually appropriate applications, the learning environment must closely resemble the work environment. A design-build studio in architecture education is one such format designed to resemble the architectural practice and to create a better learning environment for its participants. The pedagogy of design-build studios uses tools of experiential learning like role-playing, reflective practice, etc. Although, the existing literature on design-build studios present substantial elaborations on participants' learning; there is marginal documentation of the participants’ perspectives on their experience. This paper presents the process of analyzing open-ended responses from sixty-six participants of a design-build project conducted at the School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal, India. In addition, the study elaborates a major theme ‘evaluating design-build learning’ that emerged from the data along with five sub-themes. This qualitative exploration helped in understanding the deeper meaning of design-build studios and their effect on participants' learning. Also, it helped in evaluating the design-build pedagogy for architecture education.