Evolution and assessment of a pedagogy

Since 2002, the Master’s students at the Graduate School of Architecture of Nantes who are enrolled in the “Architecture in Representation” orientation have carried out a pioneering work in the use of digital tools. By adopting the most recent techniques and tools, they have transformed the architectural design approach, thanks to the integration of “narrative design”.

In fifteen years, students will have gone from the board to digital drawing, to immersion and virtual reality, including short films and interactive devices, without losing sight that the subject of the work is in fact the project, and not the tool. In doing so, they have questioned, led by their professors, the status of synthesis images, the challenges of interactive narrative and of the virtual world.

Within the school, time was needed to accept these explorations; the use of digital tools, long criticised, was blocking the appreciation of the content and the students’ experimental approaches. Nowadays, the experience from these past fifteen years lead us to ask this question: do digital tools renew the design paradigms, or are we only involved in the evolution of practices through the integration of other means?