The Threshold of Abstraction in Beginning Design Pedagogy

Abstract

By immediately being asked to work abstractly, beginning design students are investigating architecture through a pedagogy taken-for-granted by its instructors. To abstract something is to draw it out of the concrete, and unless a student is looking for this displacement, they will become disconcerted, struggle, and become lost to the design process. Abstract operations of design, when presented out of step with student self-development, can mislead and distort experience. This essay defines a student’s encounter with abstraction as a threshold concept within the transformative journey of design student self-development. Writings about abstraction in artistic production by Sigfried Gidieon and Rudolph Arnheim define abstraction and provide a basis for critique of abstraction as a threshold concept in beginning design pedagogy. Challenges caused by abstraction for both pedagogy and beginning design students are investigated. Arnhem’s definition of abstraction as relations between part and whole implies a pedagogical approach for learning design that positions encounters with abstraction as a transformative threshold, suggesting that a gradual introduction of abstraction can build connections through embodied experience rather than disassociations. A series of architectural design exercises will be demonstrated that are structured, as result of this study, to gradually introduce abstract operations in design through a progressively transforming sequence over the first six weeks of beginning design studio. Delivered as analogous to architecture, each successive exercise initiates an abstract design operation as an individual design choice, enabling students to learn to see part in terms of whole, toward a working, conceptual understanding of abstraction in design.