Prototypes in architectural education:: As instruments of integration in the digital era

Architectural design and education today has a strong new focus on process, material and data organizations with the conceptual background of emergence and complexity of the digital era. In this paper, we reevaluate the design as research, and distinguish the digital and conceptual modes of prototypes in dialogue with the material prototypes. Through four instances in our current educational experience, we review this dialogue and the field of potentialities that exist in the interrelation of the different modes of prototypes. Contemporary design entails relational thinking, computational and systemic methodology and thus operates within the continuous feedback between the digital and the material.