Breaking the Rules: Towards an Experimental Design Pedagogy

The Great Game is a laboratorial course that problematises the traditional design studio approach, seeking for reframed modes of knowledge transmission through interactions among a multiplicity of actors and establishing situatedness as design principle. The didactic experiment of the Great Game tries to answer two questions. The first asks whether it is possible to teach an effective way of designing without applying the binary logic of what one (the teacher, a theoretical authority, an ideology) decides wrong (students’ knowledge up to that point, a certain way of doing architecture, intentions), and what is decided to be right (new and updated skills, another way of designing, ethically acceptable goals). The second asks whether it is in the form and organisation of the design studio that we should intervene (and modify) if we want to produce a change in terms of approaches to design. Logic and structure of the Great Game are presented, as well as (graphical) reports on the experiences of two iterations of the course: on these contents is built a correspondence between the pedagogical objectives and the effectiveness of design in intercepting the multiplicity of instances that emerge in any specific place and situation. We conclude by showing how through playful experimentation of architectural education, the Great Game tries to incentivise a form of knowledge that derives from nonlinear actions of mutual interlocutions and reciprocal positioning, or rather, the product of multiple instances, detournements, and even errors.