At the VOLUPTAS chair, held at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich — that’s ETH Zurich, to most of us — you might be forgiven for thinking that in certain seminars, there’s more play than work. This belies the enormous care and research behind its experimental and calibrated modes of teaching and learning. Doctoral researcher, editor, educator and architect Francisco Moura Veiga talks us through the intersections of architecture and game design, developed under the direction of Patrick Heiz and François Charbonnet.

This interview is part of KoozArch’s Issue #03 | New Rules for School.

KOOZ Thanks for making the time for us. You're looking at play as a pedagogical method, right? It's not the first time that we talk about gameplay and architecture; this happened with the Situationists and many others. But in the digital era, it is interesting that you're thinking about gaming in the classroom, and as a method of thinking.

FRANCISCO MOURA VEIGA As you say, this is not a new idea: Huizinga’s “Homo Ludens” is a common reference in the work of many architects, as recently pointed out by David Malaud in his brilliant work, Architects at Play. At Voluptas, we see potential in revisiting this affinity: especially now, when digital games have become a defining media of our society, bringing certain aspects of games and of play into architectural design thinking and teaching seems to make complete sense.

When applying for their tenure, it was Patrick Heiz and François Charbonnet’s intuition that within the incredible richness of video games — where you have moving image, sound, projected space, interaction mechanics — there would be complementary ways of creating productive connections with critical design. It was my job, within the chair, to find and deepen a line of research in the field of play that we could pursue further.

KOOZ So having developed these subjects from the Voluptas chair in your doctoral studies, tell me a little bit more about how you apply ideas of play practically, in the classroom.

FMV Three paths emerged from a period of prospective inquiry around play: firstly, the possibility of a hands-on collaboration with the ZHdK game design department; secondly, an optional seminar called Territories of Play alongside a magazine of the same name, designed by Atlas Studio, and thirdly, a doctoral project, on how to teach playful critical design in the best way possible.

I’ll start by briefly explaining the seminar, Territories of Play. In it, students are invited to reflect on specific aspects of a game and to use it to produce new takes on a city, a house, an image, and so on. Between these parameters, while drawing from the theoretical tools offered to them by guest lecturers from the realms of game design and basic readings of game theory, our students have produced truly exciting architectural perspectives on their chosen subjects. The content of each iteration, alongside a set of columns by architects and game designers, interviews and a game especially made for each issue, is published in a magazine of the same name. The first issue is out and we are currently working on the second and third.

In the new studio format, architecture students work together with game design students from the Game Design department at the ZHdK, headed by Ulrich Götz. This has been taking place in the fall or autumn semester for the last two years.

Collaboration between students is structured so as to allow both architecture and game design students to profit from a common initial research phase and to then focus on their own media, meaning that architecture students work towards an architecture project and game design students towards a functioning game until the end of the semester. All students come together for intermediate and final critiques, allowing the interchange to expand further. This has been the format so far, but we are stretching the limits of it and testing whether the collaboration between the students of both disciplines could be more inclusive, meaning that all of them would work together towards a common result that could be both a game and an architecture project.

Beyond the format, something we make a point of emphasising is a playful design attitude. This has proven to be a challenge as, in order to be playful, you need to feel free from “everyday life” constraints. In the current higher education environment, this is not without its challenges, as the evaluation and grading tend to carry a lot of weight for students.

KOOZ Right. It’s all fun and games until it comes to grading, appraisal, evaluation —

FMV Right. It is not an obvious, straightforward stance to promote in a studio, but our focus is on making students feel safe within a stable frame, one that allows them to go beyond the basic levels of attainment — even to propose the unexpected — while knowing that they will still be evaluated at the end of the semester. Outside of the studio format, in the seminar, we do take other measures to allow for this playful, low-stress mentality to emerge more easily: for instance, in order to fail the seminar, students would have to skip more than a third of the lessons. They know that there is no risk as long as they are there, they engage and hand in the content.

KOOZ In my experience and in the best cases, this attitude doesn't remove ambition; if critical judgement is being taught, there’s no need to wait for a grade as a final evaluation.

FMV Precisely, that is our hope.

KOOZ To what extent do the students engage consciously with the theory of “gamifying” the design process?

FMV Gamifying tends to be the superimposition of a reward system as a thin veneer over a design approach. This is something we do not want. Students do not gamify design, they engage in something more complex and enriching than simple gamification: it has to do with owning a mentality, a playful attitude towards design. Going beyond gamifying, achieving a true understanding of the mechanics of play and associated concepts is something the teaching staff from the ZHdK pushes for in a brilliant way, through the many lectures and inputs they bring into the collaboration. The question of them being conscious of having a playful attitude in their design process is something we will be able to better assess once we develop the proper tools to measure it.

KOOZ And who are your students; is it your impression that you’re teaching people who want to work in architectural design rather than game design? And if we were to evaluate a student's project right now, what we would be looking for is the application of this playful thinking in terms of problem solving — rather than in traditional “design” skills, right?

FMV It is funny, we did have a few architecture students complaining that they were expecting to design a game when they ended up designing an architecture project. But what we expect students to take away, as you say, is this playful critical design thinking, through the many tools we offer them at the chair. More than problem solving, we are interested in how students set up a problem or predicament in any given context and within any set of constraints. At the end, what we evaluate is how far the project can go, how broad its reach is in conceptual and representational terms. Now, when students are studying at university, certain contexts and constraints are suggested to them in order to limit their horizon and allow for them to focus on the topics we want to research together. Later on, it will be up to each student to deal with the complex issue of framing their own field of inquiry.

KOOZ Indeed, too much freedom can be a scary thing. Getting back to your doctoral studies, where and how do such experiments extend?

FMV My doctoral project stems from our intention of understanding how we could teach what we teach in the best way possible, and how we could take the learning experience we are creating beyond the borders of the institution. The ETH Zurich gave the chair the mandate to promote learning and to engage with students in order to produce knowledge. Our goal is to do both in the best way possible. Architecture teachers and tutors can learn from the incredible knowledge pool generated by scientists who dedicate themselves to the questions of learning. I was extremely lucky in being selected for the first cohort of the Joint Doctoral Program of Learning Sciences, a collaboration between the Learning Sciences departments of the ETH Zurich and the EPF Lausanne. Under the co-supervision of Patrick Heiz and Pierre Dillenbourg, I am able to bring knowledge from the Learning Sciences into our teaching, and hopefully, to position architecture as a contributing discipline for the Learning Sciences knowledge pool. The output of the project, in its first phase, should be a teaching method that can be used online and function semi-independently from a tutor; in a later phase, this could develop into playful online activities or a learning game that could be used by any architecture student with a computer and an internet connection.

We started by trying to understand existing, previously tested methods from the Learning Sciences — for instance, approaches that proved to be effective for the learning of mathematics, physics, chemistry, even art history — and to apply the tools and metrics used in their assessment to the results of our teaching in architectural design. To measure the effectiveness of our specific teaching method, we will run a basic experimental design framed as a further iteration of the Territories of Play seminar. We will test and assess the learning of a specific mode of critical design which, in the process of my research, I call Playful Reframing. This mode underlines the intentionality and mindset of playfulness, in collaboration with a design technique that we call reframing: basically, to look at things without changing them at first, but rather to change their context(s).

KOOZ Again, can I ask you to share an example with us?

FMV For instance, in the preparatory studies run this far, a first goal was to establish that “typology” is dynamic: that typology is never a strict or a defined category, and that the definitions of typology go beyond the modernist synthesised logic of “form follows function”. From afar, this might sound obvious but in the midst of the design process, such concepts tend to crystallise, precluding students from questioning norms and often stopping them from extracting more from the possibilities of reframing.

We have been applying a set of interventions based on a Learning Sciences theory called “Conceptual Change.” Here’s a practical, very short example of how it works: kids tend to think that a pullover is warm; their parents tell them to get a pullover when it is cold, and they feel warmer after putting it on. We know that the pullover itself is not warm: a pullover merely insulates, it prevents energy from flowing from one body to another, or from a higher temperature zone to a lower one. So how do you change this misconception of a pullover? There are three steps that you have to take: first, you have to make their prediction fail, by showing a situation where a pullover keeps something cold instead of keeping it warm — an ice cube, for instance. After failing to predict the behaviour of a pullover, they will question their prior knowledge. Then you have to confront them with upgraded knowledge: telling them that the pullover insulates but it does not heat because its fibres are poor energy conductors. Finally, you have to offer them a chance to make a rationale out of it by allowing them to predict the behaviour of the pullover in a different situation. These are the three basic steps. What I have tried to do is to apply this to the complex concept of “typology” with architecture students, allowing them to continue questioning the many seemingly stable concepts in their current realities and, hopefully, in their future.

KOOZ You know, I think it's just as you say: it's about enabling students to give themselves permission to question, to apply that criticality of thinking. It's been fascinating to learn about your work at the Voluptas chair; thanks for your time.

Bio

Francisco Moura Veiga is an architect, researcher, and editor based in Schaffhausen and Santarém. He is a doctoral student in the Joint Doctoral Program for the Learning Sciences ETHZ EPFL, with Patrick Heiz and Pierre Dillenbourg, and a teaching and research assistant at VOLUPTAS. He is the principal of the architecture office A Forschung, the founder of CARTHA Magazine, and of the online platform Publishing in Architecture.

VOLUPTAS is François Charbonnet and Patrick Heiz’s Chair for Architecture and Design at ETH Zurich’s Department of Architecture.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.