ARCH-101: Case Studies in Architecture
COOL-101: Collaborative,On-Line Design Studio
Primary Instructor and Course Coordinator
Yehuda E. Kalay, Professor of Architecture, UC Berkeley
Instructors
John Marx, Design Principal, Form-4 Architecture, San Francisco, CA (
COOL-101: Collaborative, On-Line Design Studio, will explore the potentials of Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) for design collaboration. The course is a joint effort by the Department of Architecture at UC Berkeley,and the Smithsonian Institution in WashingtonDC.
The course aims to provide students with hands-on skills in creating virtual, immersive architectural and socialplaces in Cyberspace. These interactive virtual environments present a new possibility for collaborative activities, including in particular creative and participatory design. The studio will use Second Life ( popular 3D multi-user on-line virtual world—to design, build, and use a 3-dimensional, immersive ‘portal’ to the Smithsonian Institution’s 19 museums + zoo.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, comprises of 19 museums, including the National Air and SpaceMuseum, the Cooper-HewittNationalDesignMuseum, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of American History, and the NationalZoologicalPark. Physically, these museums are dispersed all over WashingtonDC. The studio will create a park-like virtual ‘super museum,’ with exhibits representing the various museums, social gathering places, and the opportunity to hold guided tours, discussions, and classes. Visitors will be able to log into Second Life, don avatars, and visit representative exhibits of each of the Smithsonian’s museums, from which they will be able to access each museum’s own web site. The special features afforded by the MUVE will be emphasized and integrated into the project.
In the physical world, students will meet face-to-face twice-a-week in regular studio settings for lectures and discussions that deal with the theoretical issues and intellectual challenges of such new media. On-line, they will log into Second Life, to communicate and collaborate with each other. The same medium will also be the place where they will carry out various introductory design exercises and collaboratively produce the final outcome of the course, the “The Virtual Museum of Arts, History, Technology, and Culture”—a large-scale interactive virtual exhibition space that will be made available for the use of the entire online community.
No prior knowledge of Second Life is required.