2018.
I created a unit on Timber Engineering where students came to work for my made- up company one day a week and I wrote a blog post every week for 12 weeks and called it “The Office”.
If you are familiar with The Office, you will know that I am a fan of flipped teaching. You will also know that for this unit I ended up writing two new books so the students had the reference material they needed for their learning. If you’re not familiar you can find it here: https://bilt.online/the-office-authentic-learning-in-civil-engineering/
2020.
It’s the pandemic. My normal routine of sitting in coffee shops to do my thinking is replaced by buying takeout coffee in Bath, where I live, walking to the river Avon and sitting on the recently relandscaped footpath looking across to the offices of engineering firm Buro Happold, which are oddly silent.
One day, my brain starts to think about a book on design. It would contain a series of double page spreads[1], with an image on one page and a short description on the other, which would cover the breadth and depth of design ideas. That would provide challenging and often at times seemingly (and knowingly) contradictory advice.
When I got home I would write down all the topics I considered including in this book. And then forgot all about it.
2023.
For the first time in my 20+ year career I am teaching a first-year undergraduate unit. This has forced me to go right back to first principles on what design is, how we frame it, what methodologies we use, all of that stuff. I start to again think about my book on design.
2024.
I start writing a new unit for our MSc on Sustainable Design.
I decide, like ‘The Office’, that the unit will have no lectures. Instead, students will work on a series of projects. But unlike for ‘The Office’ the students won’t be learning about a technical subject, but about the basis of design itself.
So, I return back to my book idea.
What if every project used a different design approach?
The unit is on sustainable design.
So, what if each project also takes a different approach to how sustainability is measured, and when it is considered, and how it shapes design.
I grab my large thinking pad and sketch it out.
Yes, that’s what I’ll do.
So, over the last few months, when I have a spare hour (or 15 minutes) I have tried to write a couple of pages of the core notes.
But this is not a first-year unit, it is an MSc unit. The core notes are not really the main learning, they are just a launching point for students to discover more, through blogs and online lectures and podcasts and books.
After a lot of thought, the unit plan looks like this.
Every week there is some pre-learning, delivered on Blackboard and given in the templated approach we created in engineering during the pandemic. There is a short intro, a spark task to get the students thinking, the main content, which has the links to the different core content for that week, and then the option to access some extra material if the students would like.
The plan shows how this unit links to the previous unit on Sustainable Systems. It includes what pages of the core notes (called Book Content) are covered. There are also links to other books that the students have free access to as part of the unit under “other content”.
And in the end I did decide to give two “lectures”. The first was an intro to the unit, myself (I think credibility in a space is really important, so it is my attempt to show I am credible, which I was really nervous about as, although I have done lots of design as a structural engineer, I am not a designer in quite the way some people think of it). The second lecture was on Regenerative Design, a new topic and one that I have been presenting to a number of engineering companies so it seemed right to also present it to my students, although I am not sure how well it went, I was aware that for some it was going over their heads, whereas for others I felt they had done the pre-reading and felt like I was just repeating myself.
Which brings us to the age-old question, how do I know students are engaging in the content? Well, that is the point of the assessment, which I will come onto next week.
[1] Similar to Matthew Frederick’s 101 things I learnt in architecture school (MIT Press, 2007)
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