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ISBN 978-84-09-29615-6 e-ISSN 2445-3641
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CIVAE 2021 3rd Interdisciplinary and Virtual Conference on Arts in Education
Using Modular Construction Brick-Based CAD in
Online Design Education
Oğuz Orkun Doma, Sinan Mert Şener
Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
Abstract
The sudden change of design education into a distance education model due to the global pandemic
in recent years has posed additional challenges for rst-year architecture students, who have no prior
design education foundation. These developments have forced instructors to tailor their tools and cur-
ricula to the changing situation. Considering the case, we propose a novel approach that will encourage
students to develop architectural design ideas based on LEGO components and formal interventions
that are familiar to the students. We conducted a student workshop as a design experiment using
LEGO bricks in CAD, eliminating the constraints of physical space and mockup materials. In the three-
day online workshop attended by thirteen rst-year architecture, interior architecture, and industrial de-
sign students, the participants explored modular architectural thinking and production with LEGO bricks
in a CAD environment. Participants were asked to create a user persona as their user, then design a
living pod for that persona for an activity of their choice. The designers developed their architectural
designs with online critiques given via CAD les and video conference presentations. They presented
their nal products as architectural boards and LEGO building instructions of their design. The model
proposed in this workshop develops the fundamentals of some real-life architectural practice skills:
the use of pre-engineered design modules such as real construction elements, or familiarizing novice
students with the vocabulary of CAD tools through a construction toy they are very familiar with. This
approach not only provides a valuable addition to exercises that can be used in distance architectural
design education of rst-year students, but also proposes an alternative tool for collaborative design in
higher design education and practice. Feedback from the design workshop also provides guidelines for
developing a specialized modular brick-based software tool for architectural design education.
Keywords: architectural design, design education, interaction design, distance education.
Uso de CAD Basado en bloques de construcción modular en la educación online en Diseño
Resumen
El repentino cambio de la educación en diseño a un modelo de educación a distancia debido a la
pandemia global en los últimos años ha planteado desafíos adicionales para los estudiantes de arqui-
tectura de primer año, que no tienen una base previa en educación en diseño. Estos desarrollos han
obligado a los instructores a adaptar sus herramientas y planes de estudio a la situación cambiante.
Teniendo en cuenta el caso, proponemos un enfoque que alentará a los estudiantes a desarrollar
ideas de diseño arquitectónico basadas en componentes LEGO e intervenciones formales que sean
familiares para los estudiantes. Realizamos un taller para estudiantes como un experimento de diseño
utilizando ladrillos LEGO en CAD, eliminando las limitaciones de espacio físico y materiales de maque-
tas. En el taller en línea de tres días al que asistieron trece estudiantes de primer año de arquitectura,
arquitectura de interiores y diseño industrial, los participantes exploraron el pensamiento y la produc-
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3rd Interdisciplinary and Virtual Conference on Arts in Education CIVAE 2021
ción arquitectónica modular con ladrillos LEGO en un entorno CAD. Se pidió a los participantes que
crearan una persona como su usuario y luego diseñaran una cápsula de vida para esa persona para
una actividad de su elección. Los diseñadores desarrollaron sus diseños arquitectónicos con críticas
en línea a través de archivos CAD y presentaciones de videoconferencia. Presentaron sus productos
nales como tableros arquitectónicos e instrucciones de construcción LEGO de su diseño. El modelo
propuesto en este taller desarrolla los fundamentos de algunas habilidades de práctica arquitectónica
de la vida real: el uso de módulos de diseño prediseñados, como elementos de construcción reales,
o familiarizar a los estudiantes novatos con el vocabulario de las herramientas CAD a través de un
juguete de construcción con el que están muy familiarizados. con. Este enfoque no solo proporciona
una valiosa adición a los ejercicios que se pueden utilizar en la educación de diseño arquitectónico a
distancia de los estudiantes de primer año, sino que también propone una herramienta alternativa para
el diseño colaborativo para la educación y la práctica del diseño superior.
Palabras clave: diseño arquitectónico, educación en diseño, diseño de interacción, educación a distancia.
Introduction
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic required a rapid shift in higher design education media, tools
and environments, as well as in course structure and curricula. The change from physical medium to
the online studio proved to be exceptionally challenging for rst-year architecture and design students,
who have no prior design studio experience. The circumstances called for designing feasible, new
and eective assignments to meet the course’s learning outcomes. We aimed to consider creative
processes that students are already familiar with, while utilizing materials they can easily nd at home
for design education.
LEGO bricks were a convenient choice as a base design element. Previous studies and works
which utilized the LEGO system in architectural design education also remark on the advantages of
using LEGO bricks as base units (Cristopher Turner, 2014). LEGO bricks are aordable and easy to
acquire, as well as simple and practical to work with. They also have a great design potential with their
inherent variability and modularity. These factors make building and designing with LEGO highly enga-
ging for people. The LEGO system’s component features and rules also allow high delity simulation
and interpretation between digital and physical media. These features of LEGO bricks made us consider
using LEGO brick-based CAD in online architecture and design education.
To this end, we organized the Component-Based Living Units workshop. We invited rst-year
students to explore modular architectural thinking using digital LEGO bricks. Each participant created a
Minigure persona and designed a living unit for a specic motivational activity for that persona. Then,
they presented their works as digital presentation boards and building instruction manuals.
This paper presents our experiences and discusses the survey results as an overview of the
workshop we propose. The aims of the workshop were: [1] designing a framework for an exercise for
distant architectural design education of rst-year students, [2] to propose an alternative tool for
collaborative
design for higher design education and practice, [3] familiarizing novice students with the
vocabulary of CAD tools through a construction toy they are very familiar with, and [4] developing a
specialized modular brick-based mixed reality design software for architectural design education based
on the feedback from the design workshop.
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CIVAE 2021 3rd Interdisciplinary and Virtual Conference on Arts in Education
Methodology
The participants of the workshop were selected from Istanbul Technical University’s (ITU) Foundation
Studio students. At ITU Faculty of Architecture, the design courses of the rst three semesters are given
by the initiative of all ve departments called the “Foundation Studio” where rst-year students of all
departments are mixed (Gürer & Küçükersen, 2020). Component-Based Living Units workshop was or-
ganized as a part of the Foundation Studio workshops. The quota for the workshop was for 13 rst-year
(second semester) students. The workshops are announced online on ITU’s learning management
website with posters, short descriptions, requirements, and instructor bios with Eventbrite event links
for registration. The participants were selected on a rst-come, rst-served basis. The participation re-
quirements were enthusiasm on architectural design and playing with LEGO bricks, having completed
the given reading list of three resources before the workshop, attending the workshop with a notebook
or desktop PC with LeoCAD, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe InDesign installed.
Participants
The participants of the workshop were 13 rst-year students from the ITU Faculty of Architecture. The
ages of the participants vary between 18 and 30 (age mean: 20, SD: 3.16); a majority of 8 students
were 19 years old. Six students were female (46%), and seven students were male (54%). The distri-
bution of the departments that students came from is as follows: 7 Architecture (53.8%), 3 Interior Archi-
tecture (23.1%), and 3 Industrial Design (23.1%). Eight students had used CAD tools before (61.5%),
while ve had no prior CAD tool experience (38.5%).
Workshop Protocol
The participants were given three pre-workshop reading assignments. The LEGO Architect (Al-
phin, 2015) and The LEGO Architecture Idea Book (Finch, 2018) were given as the resources for
examples and inspirations on details, surface qualities, architectural tectonics, and structural forms
with LEGO bricks. The chapter titled Building Blocks of Thought (Shores, 2017) was given as a reading
about the conceptual and theoretical basis of how construction toys related with architectural design
and thinking. In the lecture section of the workshop, discussion of the readings and inspiration materials
took part along the introduction of the LEGO brick elements, types of LEGO pieces, and the building
methods to have specic terminology in place.
In LEGO builds, the human scale is a complex issue. A brick conguration can represent a pole
or a high-rise building, depending on the human scale. Therefore, we asked the participants to accept
the height of a LEGO Minigure to be equivalent to human height. This assumption gives us a scale of
42.5:1. Figure 1 shows the dimensions of a LEGO brick versus the dimensions of a LEGO brick when
a Minigure is scaled to human size.
Figure 1. A LEGO Minigure and a human gure compared in size and scaled to each other
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3rd Interdisciplinary and Virtual Conference on Arts in Education CIVAE 2021
LeoCAD is a LEGO CAD software that allows users to design with LEGO bricks, save their
models, visualize it in 3D, and create building instructions. Students were asked to create their archi-
tectural designs in LeoCAD and develop them with online critiques given with the CAD les and video
conference presentations.
The nal assignment of the workshop was to create a persona as a custom Minigure and to
decide on a motivational activity for this persona. The participants were subsequently asked to design
a single person living unit with a covered area for weather protection, accommodating sitting, sleeping,
and the hobby activity they chose for the persona on a 12 by 12 by 12 unit volume with bricks, which
corresponds to approximately 4 m x 4 m x 4 m.
The workshop took three days. The rst day’s four-hour program included introductions, lectures,
discussion of reading assignments, LeoCAD training, and a warm-up exercise. Then the nal assignment
was announced. After a long design critique session in the second day’s four-hour program, visualization
in digital media and an InDesign crash course was conducted. Students had hands-on experience with
the poster template using current design proposals. On the third day, all Foundation Studio workshops
came together, and the works were introduced. The students presented their designs, then a general
discussion of thoughts and feedback on the process took place.
Results
The students presented the nal works as posters and step-by-step building instructions, similar to
the instruction booklets one would expect to nd in actual LEGO box sets. The nal posters are being
displayed online (Doma, 2021).
Post-workshop Survey Responses
At the end of the workshop, the participants took a survey to review their experiences and thoughts.
The survey questions and student responses can be seen in Table 1. The results of the survey show
that the participants had an overall positive experience.
Table 1.
Post-workshop evaluation survey results
Mean Response Value (SD) Response Variables
Design ideation potential with physical LEGO bricks*4.23 (0.83) 1: Very poor
2: Poor
3: Acceptable
4: Good
5: Very Good
Design iteration potential with physical LEGO bricks‡4.46 (0.78)
Design ideation potential with LEGO bricks in CAD*4.38 (0.65)
Design iteration potential with LEGO bricks in CAD‡4.38 (0.77)
Advantage of physical LEGO bricks over CAD bricks 3.77 (0.93)
1: Much worse
2: Somewhat worse
3: Stayed the same
4: Somewhat better
5: Much better
Do you prefer LEGO based CAD as a design tool 0.77 (0.44)
3 No, 10 Yes No: 0, Yes: 1
* p>.05, ‡ p>.05
The participants’ responses to categorical survey questions clearly show that they see LEGO
bricks as a base design element with high potential. The majority (77%) of the participants said they
would use LEGO-based CAD as a design tool in their future projects.
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CIVAE 2021 3rd Interdisciplinary and Virtual Conference on Arts in Education
There were also open-ended questions in the survey that asked students to briey explain their
process and give feedback on certain aspects of the procedure. The positive themes in the paragraph
answers included: [1] the design process was more fun than other assignments, [2] LEGO bricks being
an easily comprehensible and familiar design element, [3] ability to generate ideas faster and make
iterations faster, [4] Advantage of having all the LEGO brick types and never running out of parts, and
[5] ease of changing colors, and making changes to earlier steps without starting over. Negative themes
were: [1] LEGO builds don’t represent an architectural product accurately in detail, but good for concep-
tual sketches, [2] monolithic, indivisible and orthogonal nature of the LEGO pieces, [3] the loss of tactile
feeling and instant feedback of physical bricks in CAD, [4] having all types of LEGO bricks brings with it
some indecision and getting lost among the pieces, and [5] bugs and missing features of LeoCAD. The
participants reported the most sought after features that the current tool (LeoCAD v21.03) lacked as
[1] realistic connections that prevent physically impossible collided connections, [2] sharing creations
and collaborating with other designers, [3] being able to organize the parts library for better search and
frequently used parts, [4] structural stability check, and [5] realistic rendering in the viewport.
Discussion
In the proposed workshop framework, we examined the use of modular LEGO bricks that can be
easily assembled with a simple set of rules to explore component-based design thinking and modular
construction. This approach can help to teach the fundamentals of real-life architectural practice skills,
such as the use of pre-engineered construction elements in architectural design.
The workshop resulted in a very open and inviting environment where the students would express
their creative thinking using LEGO bricks. Students had a chance to produce building instructions with
a step-by-step inductive approach, as opposed to the deductive approach in conventional architectural
graphics. The participants also gave positive feedback about the advantage of learning to create pro-
duct posters and architectural boards in InDesign using LEGO CAD outputs. Since the representations
produced by the software were graphically correct and at a certain level of detail, the students could
focus on the layout design.
The results of the survey show that the participants had a positive experience in the workshop
in general. However, no statistically signicant dierence was found between their assessment of
physical bricks versus CAD bricks (p>0.05). For generalizable comparisons between the CAD brick
building versus physical brick building, specialized future studies with more participants are needed.
Following the workshop, students’ survey responses have been further rened. Their feed-
back about the tool and the design process is currently being used to develop a specialized modular
brick-based software tool for architectural design education as a part of our DREAMSCAPE research
project.
Acknowledgments
We want to thank Instr. Dr. Çiğdem Eren and the other coordinators of Foundation Studio courses at
ITU Faculty of Architecture, for inviting us to organize the Component-Based Living Units workshop as
a part of their workshop week events.
LEGO and the Minigure are trademarks and copyrights of the LEGO Group, which does not
sponsor, endorse, or authorize this academic research work.
This study is conducted as a part of a research project that is supported by the Research Fund of
Istanbul Technical University (ITU BAP Project ID: 41269).
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References
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Doma, O. O. (2021). Component-Based Living Units. http://oguzdoma.com/2021/04/26/component-based-living-units
Finch, A. (2018). The LEGO Architecture Idea Book. No Starch Press, Inc.
Gürer, E., Küçükersen, F. (2020). Performing a New Agenda for a First-Year Interior Architecture Studio. 218–256. doi: https://
doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-7254-2.ch011
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