The Dissertation is individual in the choice of the project scenario exploration, yet the method of guidance and interrogation is reliant upon shared learning and group discussions. The current teaching scenario we found ourselves in enabled opportunities to engage with distant partners through the digital forum. We invited guests to some of our studio sessions to contribute their thinking on design process and hopefully through these discussions add a richness and layering for individual design processes.

​

Internally within the UCT School of Architecture, Planning & Geomatics, the Urban Design Studio and Landscape Architecture Studio took the opportunity to share remote teaching during the first two weeks of the semester and share milestone reviews. The Urban Design Studio lecturers, Dr Katie Ewing and Hedwig Crooijmans-Lemmer and their students participated in these joint sessions.

 

Internationally, Dr Julian Raxworthy (Dubai) participated in  two remote sessions with the students during the first two weeks of the semester. As the reviews were also online, with co-operation from the examiners and students we timed the exams so that we would have the privilege of Professor Thaisa Way (Seattle), Dr Finzi Saidi (Johannesburg), Vikki Crawley (Stellenbosch) and Darryl Pryce-Lewis (Cape Town) as our examiners.

 

The first half of the studio learning was remote, we were fortunate to be able to meet face to face once a week within a controlled studio environment for the last two months of the dissertations.

 

As the making of interventions is understood within this studio to be an integrated reiterative process the relationship between conceptual thinking, strategies, detail design and site resolutions are seamless and interdependent. Technology explorations were integrated within the various explorations and artefacts generated within the structured studio tasks.

​

During the first two weeks all thesis student were required to engage in an explorative exercise in which we endeavoured to explore the process embedded within their enquiries. These informed their Manifestos which underpin and support their explorations.

 

As designers, we each bring our concerns, queries, passions, agendas, and skills to the inquiry we table. The way we enter and the lens through which we perceive and interrogate the hypothesis and inquiry guides and informs the process of designing and making. This resulted in a rethinking of the entry process into the thesis, and a restructuring of the threshold of entry.