Rural Studio

Most of the IwB team headed off to OCAD (Ontario College of Art & Design) last night. They had a great presentation from Rusty Smith on the Rural Studio. You can read about it yourself so suffice to say that his talk and their work was very inspiring. It was of particular interest because the IwB is currently in the middle of its World House Project. On the face of it it seems that we're trying to do similar things (affordable housing) but listening to the talk made the students aware of how different our approach is. The Rural Studio is an architecture studio. If the IwB was to be described (and we're still working this out) perhaps it is a multidisciplinary design studio. This means that it mixes different kinds of designers together and also brings in experts from other fields. The thought here is that complex problems can't be solved from within only one discipline. That's that hypothesis - you need to bring lots of different skills together to get rounded solutions. But just how you do this is being worked out while we work on projects. Right now the students are thinking about how to experiment and uncover what kinds of interdisciplinary practices work best. Should we look at a problem through the lens of a particular discipline lead by an expert from that field? Should we work in pairs from very different disciplines (computer science and interior design)? Should we try to find some common approaches and all work together? We'll let you know how the experiments go over the coming months.