Design in Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design.

In what ways can architectural design define identity, or alternatively, challenge received identity? Based on a design pedagogy that experiments with both defamiliarization and dance, we distinguish two ways: (1) in the readymade space of the eye, as meanings other than the received ones can emerge, or (2) in the space-in-the-making of the body, as the reading of meaning in ready-made space alone is challenged, and meaning also emerges in the order of our mutual movement with one another. Our pedagogy represents a collaboration between an architect and a philosopher, both actively engaged in interdisciplinary education within and between their respective schools as well as with the School of Engineering. From the outset, we saw "design in movement" as a potential framework to foster side-by-side collaboration between disciplines (interdisciplinarity) rather than merely among disciplines (multidisciplinarity). Design in movement is a complement to traditional architectural design in space. Design in movement allows us to experience, through our bodies, in a way that challenges our deeply ingrained visual culture. If we design in this visual culture without being able to call the culture into question, we do not take advantage of the full range of design's liberative potential: it is one thing to design so as to refuse any single authoritative reading in space, but another to discover an alternative to reading itself. We are investigating how design in movement can motivate new ways of liberative building and inhabiting that challenge the hegemony of design in space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]