ABSTRACT
British professor Bruce Lawson gave two groups of college seniors the same problem: to determine certain unknown rules for combining variously colored wooden blocks. Students majoring in the sciences comprised one group, while architecture majors made up the other. Learning, in its most basic form, is one of the natural consequences of living and survival. Design problems must provide the raw material for “sensing” the solution. While studio assignments may foreground specific skills, principles, or applications as the focus of study, they generally embed these issues within larger problems in which all the components and conditions of an “experience” are present. The project-based inquiry of design allows students and faculty to assess understanding through authentic performance. While the design disciplines certainly have a history of inquiry-guided learning, they have practiced it inadvertently, simply because design arises from man’s identity as a culture-making being.
