Investing in soft skills in (interior) architectural design education?!

Abstract

Design education is beyond learning to design. This paper is a first exploration in the metacognitive skills (i.e. soft skills) that first-year bachelor students at the faculty of Architecture and arts at Hasselt University apply and lack in their path to becoming professional designers. Based on a literature study into soft skills in design education and ethnographic experiences from the researchers, we performed observations at the (interior) architectural design studio jury, to detect what phases are present in a typical jury moment, and how and what soft skills students as well as tutors rely on. We were able to identify crucial co-experiential moments in which students missed out on specific soft skills such as communication and ownership, influencing their overall performance in a negative manner. Simultaneously, we could notice that the tutors heavily relied on their well-advanced soft skill of communication while often being inattentive to the emphatical, ethical component therein. We conclude our paper by explaining how we will continue our research via the co-experiential moments.