Conscious Content Creation

As part of the thesis advising offerings for the fifth year
students, professor Nero He and I proposed a Thesis
Concentration Area, advising 10 thesis students.

Content Creation today is characterized by precipitous attempts to survive within the context of a short attention span world. Architecture, a field that uses content creation as tools to communicate, is presently embracing, nurturing and aggrandizing this spectacle modus operandi in its pedagogical and professional practices. This Concentration Area questions whether or not certain content creation in architecture representation has been made consciously or if it’s presented as the result of the falling for tropes, following of trends, and repeating of jargon without knowing the whys or hows. To make architectural work visible and accessible to an audience students will be challenged to create and develop multi-media methods of representation that communicate ideas with intention.
During the Fall semester, students will be collectively and independently working on Thesis Preparation. This early phase of the project, framed through the lens of contemporary content creation, includes three main processes: Accumulation, Statement, and Miniature. Information Accumulation will be managed as a digital, curated documentation of their thesis explorations in the format of text, images, videos and other forms of media. They will be asked to record a written and/or visual response (for it, against it – a stance) to this content accumulation; it will be a method of wayfinding to formulate their statement about conscious content creation. By the end of the semester, students will have created a miniature as a material proposition/thesis statement.
The collective component of their first semester’s work will become a database that can be shared, exhibited, and publicly accessible to all. This ties to one of the main objectives of the Conscious Content Creation CA: the democratization of knowledge. This will be evidenced with a proposed exhibit of student work to be scheduled early January – shared with the VT community, Blacksburg, and beyond. These digital and physical showcase spaces can become participatory, interactive open forums, extending the conversations to a bigger audience and involving them in the process of information accumulation. The open forum will occur on a smaller scale, through weekly roundtable discussions with the students and guests, presenting moments for dialogue and discussion of the ideas and work being accumulated.
During the Spring semester, students will continue to develop their independent methods of content creation, evolving their architectural propositions and solidifying an architectural position through a critical lens. By this time, students will be actively experimenting with atypical, customized, representational techniques to strategically communicate their architectural design and respond to the CA’s statement – within the framework of conscious content creation.
This Concentration Area will physically/digitally bring experts in various disciplines as mentors, lecturers, and guest critics. These opportunities will not only allow students to be exposed to different perspectives and modes of thinking/working, but will also allow for mentor/mentee relationships to be built. Another exciting prospect is that, due to the fact that both Nero He and Isaac Mangual are Foundation instructors, interactions between first and fifth year students are bound to happen. Through the nature of collaboration and engagement in this Concentration Area, all students, regardless of whether they are in the beginning or end of their academic experience, will be exposed to an environment of content creation inquisitiveness. This is something exciting to explore pedagogically, as designing with different media sets everyone to the same starting line. This will advocate for a special studio culture, where knowledge transfer and opportunities for growth and skill development and mentorship are horizontal. This will further a desire in all students to engage with multi-media as authentic modes of representation.
Conscious Content Creation will not only serve the common thread that ties each member of the Concentration Area as they develop their independent architectural proposition, but it will be the way of engaging critically in all facets of their 5th year experience: research, documentation, thesis project, and the customized representational methods developed.