Zero Gravity: radical creativity by multidisciplinary collaboration

Parallel Session 76, Tactile strategies for teaching spatial structures (WG 20) Günther H. Filz, Serenay Elmas, Athanasios A. Markou, Katja Hölttä-Otto and Saurabh Deo (Aalto University) present their work on multidisciplinarity. In 2013, the report “ARTS+ENG, Future Collaborative Academic Models at Aalto” was published. The most significant collaboration endeavour between the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, and the School of Engineering was the “Synthesis Studio”, a platform for multidisciplinary collaboration, first established as ARTS-ENG Project Course in 2016. Since then the course underwent a transformation from disciplinary oriented to “discipline-free” topics of “Zero Gravity”, always in mind that its pedagogic intent is to lay an early foundation for multidisciplinary skills in future levels of study and to trigger radical creativity. This paper looks into the ideas of radical creativity and presents the development of the project course as a major experiment at Aalto University, including its challenging pedagogical and logistic tasks. In 2019, the course was accompanied by creativity tests, an Alternate Uses Test and a ShapeStorm Exercise, investigating the course 's impact and its significantly positive effect on students’ creativity. Read the paper by accessing our conference proceedings. 📚 Use the link https://doi.org/10.15126/900337 to download your digital copy and let yourself be #inspired! Watch their presentation "Zero Gravity: radical creativity by multidisciplinary collaboration" from the Spatial Structures 2020/21 Conference. #IASS #IASS2020_21 #SpatialStructures #Architecture #Structures #Engineering #LightweightStructures #CivilEngineering #StructuralEngineering #Conference #Construction #computationaldesign #nextgeneration #parallelsessions #tactile #teaching #education #internationalisation #pedagogy #multidisciplinarity #collaboration