Building consensus: Design media and multimodality in architecture education

Abstract

This article explores multimodal communication and social interaction in university-level architecture education. Drawing on ethnography of North American programs of ‘design-build’ architecture, we consider how the judgment of a ‘good’ (or ‘bad’) design is as much a result of how it is communicated as what is communicated. In settings like the design ‘review’, students endeavor to persuade an audience of the merits of their proposed design. This is ideally accomplished through the ‘convergence’ of multiple design media on the same ‘idea’ or design gestalt. ‘Convergence’ involves not just technical competency; it is also a social achievement: an effect of composing and coordinating multimodal semiotic media according to shared representational and communicative conventions. Failure to recognize convergence is often an effect of intersemiotic dissonance. This is also the risk of a design’s failure in the eyes of the faculty jury, who often direct their critiques toward communicative inconsistencies.