Virtual study abroad and exchange studio

The digital design studio has an area of application where conventional med ia are incapable of being used; collaboration in learning, design and dialo gue with people in places other than where one lives. This distinctive oppo rtunity has lead the authors to explore a form of design brief and virtual design studio (VDS) format not well addressed in the literature. Instead of sharing the same design brief, students in this alternative format design a project in the other students' city and do not collaborate on the same de sign. Collaboration with other students takes the form of teaching each oth er about the city and culture served by the design. The authors discovered these studios produce a focus on site context that serves our pedagogical o bjectives - a blend of architectural, landscape architectural and urban des ign knowledge. Their students use a range of commercial CAD and computer su pported collaborative work (CSCW) software common to that used in many VDS experiments reported on in the literature. However, this conventional use of technology is contrasted with a second di stinctive characteristic of these studios, the use of custom software tools specifically designed to support synchronous and asynchronous three-dimens ional model exchange and linked attribute knowledge. The paper analyzes som e of the virtual design studio (VDS) work between the Swiss Federal Institu te of Technology, the University of Toronto, and the University of Melboume . The authors articulate a framework of VDS dimensions that structures thei r teaching and research.