Pedagogical foundations: deploying digital techniques in design / research practice

Landscape architecture has been slow to embrace the potentials of digital technologies to expand design processes and techniques. Instead, these technologies often remain framed as an advanced representational tool, considered to lack the intuitive capability of more traditional design processes. Drawing on the experience of design studios held at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Melbourne (2011-2014), this paper argues for the potentials of three-dimensional modelling, parametrics, and digital fabrication in extending the design practices of landscape architecture. This paper highlights how digital technologies provide designers with additional techniques and processes for conceiving and constructing form and systems, and achieving a higher level of complexities in performance, representation, spatiality, and materiality.