Escaping Flatlands Interdisciplinary Collaborative Prototyping Solutions to Current Architectural Topics

The paper describes the interdisciplinary course, Escaping Flatlands, focusing on improving communication between students, who were either from the field of architecture or media informatics and human-computer interaction. There were two underlying themes. The first, the integration and augmentation of digital media and haptic models, escaping the flatland of classic architectural media such as paper or screens. The second theme, expert-laymen communication in public participation, was addressed in the contextual theme and content of the course task, the communication between students of different fields, and the presentation of robust working prototypes at an architectural exhibition. Students, in groups of four, developed three interactive architectural models enhanced with digital content. The course resulted in a number of benefits to students, the chairs, and implications for research. It also led to further collabourations between the two universities involved, including cross-over Bachelor and Master Thesis.