2024 Vår

Description of the studio series

The Circular Prototyping studio offers students a comprehensive understanding of architecture within the context of environmental sustainability. The curriculum centers on the principles of circular building practices, with a specific focus on building materials and construction techniques that substantially mitigate environmental impact. These principles are investigated within a design-build studio format, equipping students with vital tools to guide form-finding processes and facilitate critical evaluation of sustainability measures as an integral part of the design process. The design explorations also include climate adaption as consideration of local weather and climate conditions, spanning the historical context, present circumstances, and future climate scenarios. These projections, in parallel with strategies to reduce negative impact, establish a meaningful link between present design choices and their alignment with the long-term UN Sustainability Goals (SDGs).

An essential aspect of the curriculum involves introducing students to the application of lifecycle methodology and environmental assessment (LCA) as a decision-making tool. LCA enables students to analyse the environmental impacts associated with linear versus circular practices, fossil versus renewable resources, and provides insight into policy considerations to facilitate sustainable outcome. As part of the semester work, each student will produce an individual paper reflecting on findings from the design-build process, with particular emphasis on circular potentials and concerns. These papers will be assessed alongside design contributions and building activities to enhance learning experience in circular practices and proficiency in lifecycle methodology.  

The studio´s core activities revolve around collaborative design-build projects that mirrors architectural practice. The hands-on experience with building allows students to apply theoretical knowledge in a practical manner and foster a deeper understanding of possibilities and challenges at hand as we move forward into a future with circular economy and ecological awareness. Each studio semester focuses on in-depth investigations of different materials or components in relation to their environmental potentials. For the spring semester 2024, our partners include Sperlebakken, a creative space for arts, crafts and ecological food production, and FutureBuilt, a publically owned initiative aiming at climate neutrality in the building industry aligned with the UN SDG´s. The project is situated in Luster, within Vestland county, and its primary objective to design a cluster of lodges dedicated to an artist in residence program. The specific material of interest is clay, a traditionally renowned bio-based material that has garnered increasing attention in the industry due to its notable environmental capabilities as well as its positive effect on indoor climate and health. Throughout the semester, students will conduct comprehensive investigations encompassing site analysis, climate considerations, material studies, and building techniques, progressing from conceptual ideas to full-scale prototyping of a lodge unit at Sperlebakken in May.  

Fresh to your door“ takes the infrastructural back-end of urbanism –the sourcing and distribution of goods and water– to the fore and actively explores its potential spatiality and sociality.

As part of „Oslo Hydropolis“ the studio explores landscape-based, watersensitive urbanism within the Oslo Metropolitan Region.

In face of climate change with its increasing risks of draught and flooding, and continuing urbanisation pressure, the studio proposes a complementary approach to the current paradigm of compact city development –with all its blinds spots such as the relocation of production and commerce into areas „out of sight“.

It engages the functional requirements of adaptation to changing environmental conditions as much as spatial aesthetics and possible everyday practices.

Concretely, the studio will develop a cross-scalar landscape framework as the basis for development. It will re-consider one of the „out of debate“ locations and propose a counter-proposal to the current expansion of a commercial area along the western axis of the Oslo region.

The studio accepts the need of large scale ware houses accelerated by online trade and will propose concepts of how to embed the programme into the wider landscape context, as well to spatially qualify the emerging structures for both non-human and human usage - if not pleasure.

The conviction of the studio is that here –in a context of space-consuming buildings where planning and architecture often fails to pronounce spatial and environmental values– the scope, the frame, the dimensions, the performance, the materials and atmospheres inherent to landscape architecture can provide a long term transformative perspective to urban development.

The methodology of the studio is based on merging planning and design, on oscillating between bird’s eye and eye-level view, as well as on digital and analogue tools.

Transform is a course in Industrial Design dealing with basic- and new tools for developing, prototyping, and conveying design solutions. The course is organized around two extensive main iterations and phases. Students practice the steps all the way from idea to finish on a design object before Easter. After Easter, we shall practice a method where design fiction and future scenarios become inhabited with imaginary conceptual products. The outcome of both phases will be physical products presented by digital media.

The course focuses on using various forms of physical and digital prototypes that support the creative ideation process. Sketching and model building will therefore be blended with e.g., material explorations, digital visualization, and other forms of conveying a rich variety of different design concepts. Independent of which technology is used, emphasis will always be on the core competencies traditionally found in Industrial Design.

For each individual student, the curriculum might be slightly modified.

This course, delivered in 2 blocks, focuses on honing existing Service Design knowledge and competencies through practice by direct access to AHO’s focus areas of research, whilst actively contributing to their development.

In addition, undertaking this form of learning through contributing to research, the students will develop their ability to reflect on their own design practice within the rigorous framework of research practice.

This semester will have a specific focus on research being delivered and development at AHO that focuses predominantly on Public Services. The Norwegian public sector has been quick to embrace the potential of Service Design to drive positive change and innovate within public service provision and AHO has long been a contributor in this change since including service design as a disciplinary field in 2004.

By working within this research context students will practice what they have learnt in Service Design I and/or GK5 and GK6 by applying these design skills through ‘research-through-design’ and participatory action research to ongoing research projects with in-house researchers and practitioners together with external partners. They will also develop their knowledge and gain experience of working in public sector services.

Students will also be introduced to concepts and frameworks on differing approaches to design towards reflection on their own praxis, whilst connecting this to design as an approach to knowledge production.