XRealities is a recently approved pedagogic fellowship project that will run for two years, during 2019 and 2020. This paper will introduce the project plan, some early experiments and expectations. XRealities relates to the many real and digital situations that we encounter in our digitally expanded life experiences. In contemporary education, we notice a problematic situation with abundant screens. People sit next to each other and stare at screens, looking for contact and content. We describe the current dichotomy between latent online learning materials and potential real-world experiences in campus education. The XRealities project is focused on finding alternative approaches for educational settings in which both real- world social interactions and virtual content provide new forms of intertwined learning experiences. We assume there is huge educational potential in the right juxtaposition of visual digital and real-world experiences and the embodied interaction within this augmented reality.@en

Being able to share visual course assignments and provide and receive personal feedback is essential in most studio design courses of Delft University of Technology. With the rapid growth of online and blended education teachers are confronted with the challenge of maintaining the same quality for this aspect of their teaching as in traditional face-to-face design courses. Looking for interactive ways to train creative skills in their courses, teachers found that the available WEB 2.0 tools were unsatisfactory. We mapped the requirements and found that Sketchdrive, a platform for sharing visuals, seemed to meet many of these requirements. We developed a course design integrating the visual platform Sketchdrive and collaborated with Sketchdrive to improve the platform. This resulted in a pilot project, including 3 MOOCs and 2 campus courses. This paper elaborates on the pilot project. We show how the visual platform is integrated into course designs. Next, we compare student and teacher experiences based on the results of surveys and interviews. Furthermore, we discuss differences in the blended campus courses and the online courses. In conclusion, we consider what still needs to be improved for better aligning the visual platform to our course designs. Finally, based on lessons learnt, we provide recommendations for integrating visual platforms in the course design of higher education studio design courses. @en

Design education usually takes place in a studio setting, in which visual and spatial artefacts are produced, shared, improved, presented and commented. This specific setting comes with qualitative properties that allow for situated learning with object-oriented focus and interaction, combined with a rich collegial context in which ideas can flourish and certain values and ethics are cherished. Using our education platform for online learning, we noticed the lack of support for typical creative and social design studio aspects, while factual classroom education was well supported. This paper describes how we attempt to translate the qualities of the studio education setting into an online environment for design education. Our approach is not to build a Virtual Design Studio (VDS) from the bottom up, but instead, to build on top of our universities' online education platform of choice. The paper commences with a short description of design education in a studio setting. Then a number of basic principles of design studio education is applied to the development of two Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In the last section we discuss the different setups and compare the online aspects with on campus design studio education.@en

Two decades ago, during the 1997 EAEA conference in Delft, hands were counted whether the EAEA should focus on the envisioning of physical or digital models. At that conference the count was almost equal, but we foresaw a trend that soon architects would only make use of digital models.Actually those early days of virtual city models, collaborative virtual environments and ‘VRML’, were at a high in 1997. VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language), ‘the HTML of spatial content’, was designed for the future. The VRML Cosmo Player web plugin was capable of rendering a virtual model at 20 frames per second in a ‘huge’ 640 by 480 pixels textured perspective view.A decade later, in 2007, there was much more scepticism about digitally rendered imagery. VRML became a file format for making colour 3D prints and the focus changed to making tangible models by using Computer Aided Manufacturing techniques. The ‘maker movement’ was getting into gear, while rendering had become a bit of a cliché representation method. Meanwhile corrugated cardboard remained my preferred material to quickly make sketchy ‘interactive’ scale models.At the present moment a revival or even a breakthrough is going on, again in the field of the digital models and digital modes of representation. 2016 has been a year full of news about Virtual- and Augmented Reality (VR & AR) and we can expect this trend to carry on for a while. Google recently gave ‘Cardboard’ a different meaning, now it’s the name of a cheap VR viewer and Daydream is Google’s platform that extends Cardboard with a number of controls and standalone functionality.We have come full circle. Virtual Reality gets practical while at the same time we value physical models and prototypes for their tangible and direct qualities. The divide is over and in this paper we would like to discuss a possible Virtual / Physical equilibrium.We will start with a brief discussion about the different configurations in which models and media relate to the mind of the architect and the contextual fit of a design in the ‘real world’. From that overview of configurations we continue the paper with practical examples from our education experiments, in particular a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on Models in Architecture.@en