Douglas Seidler / Publish

The following paper was presented by Douglas R Seidler at the Interior Design Educators Council 2008 Annual Conference in Montreal, Canada: March 8, 2008.

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Douglas R. Seidler

The New England School of Art & Design at Suffolk University

As the Interior Design profession approaches total transition to digital drawing through software like AutoCAD, SketchUp, and Revit, it is important that educators use appropriate methods to teach technology as an extension of each student’s existing knowledge of drawing and representation.  Most AutoCAD textbooks and curricula teach through rote memorization and repetition.  It was the Author’s experience that in following these teaching methods, students were successfully completing AutoCAD courses with little or no understanding of how to use the software in the academic studio or in the professional studio. This presentation will detail how the Author modified the AutoCAD curriculum, instruction, and grading criteria at the New England School of Art & Design, Suffolk University to help students create strong connections between their existing knowledge of hand drawing and the new knowledge of digital drawing.

Constructivist education theory suggests that learners construct new knowledge around prior ‘zones of knowledge’.  As educators, we can increase retention of new concepts and ideas by creating direct connections or bridges to our students’ prior knowledge.   In the instance of digital design education in Interior Design, it is imperative that we shape our curricula to help adult learners identify and understand the merit of manual representation. 

The Teaching for Understanding framework  builds on this theory by identifying four areas of a curriculum that are critical to develop a student understanding. Within this framework, a strong curriculum includes: (1) Generative topics that are central to a discipline and interesting to students; (2) Understanding goals that focus the objectives for a course; (3) Performances of understanding that allow a student to develop understanding from the beginning to the end of a course; and (4) Ongoing assessment that provides students appropriate criteria, feedback, and opportunities for reflection.  Using constructivist education theory and the Teaching for Understanding framework, the Author created new learning environments that help students understand the importance of hand drawing (prior knowledge) while learning new techniques in digital drawing and representation with AutoCAD.

In this revised AutoCAD curriculum, instructors introduce AutoCAD commands in the same order that they are introduced in the hand-drawing curriculum. For example, the first AutoCAD unit builds a student’s understanding of drawing and erasing both orthogonal and non-orthogonal lines through visual and verbal references to the student’s prior knowledge of pencils, erasers, and t-squares (Figure 1). By talking first about the manual tool and then introducing the AutoCAD equivalent tool, students are able to retain the new AutoCAD knowledge by creating mental connections to their zone of prior knowledge.

Using a combination of constructivist education theory and the Teaching for Understanding framework, the Author modified an existing curriculum to help students understand digital drawing in Interior Design.  As the Interior Design profession transitions to digital technology and places increasing pressure on institutions to educate students, it is important that educators build curricula that use appropriate methods to teach the use of technology as a representation tool in the design studio.  The Author has identified that by creating a bridge between manual drawing and digital drawing in AutoCAD, students construct a meaningful understanding of how to use digital technology, and that through this deeper understanding, students are better equipped to transfer this knowledge from the technical studio to future design studios.

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