Expert knowledge and the unexpected: facilitating architecture students’ design decision-making with expert interviews

Abstract

This paper investigates architecture students’ expectations of outcome and design relevance of findings from preparing and applying semi-structured expert interviews in order to facilitate individual design decision-making processes. To do so a closer investigation of a specifically devised and implemented teaching project with learning objectives and classroom assessment techniques (CATs) will be discussed. The evaluation of the teaching project shows that the CATs prove to be appropriate options to assess student learning in terms of the significant issue. Feasibility of expectation is expected to be relevant in order to learn and apply a new method in an appropriate and useful way. In this teaching project assessment shows that due to unfamiliarity with the proposed method students’ expectations of outcome are quite wide-ranging but mostly feasible. Overall, students’ expectations of interview findings could be grouped in two categories; ‹expert knowledge and facts› and ‹the unexpected and inspiration›. Most students stated that they found the interviews’ outcome to be somewhat to very helpful regarding their individual design processes while initial expectations were also diverse.