Inegalitarian Egress: Challenging Inequalities in Access to Architectural Digital Culture
Description
The paper identifies, analyses and addresses a range of inequalities in regard to the subject of access to digital culture in architectural design education. The term ‘inegalitarian egress’ is used to identify and extrapolate processes through which prospective learners who originate from ethnicities that have less access to architectural digital cultures in a range of ways.
Takeaway
The question of what, how and why learners are delivered material and encouraged to propagate traditional outputs is key to this discussion. Primary research and data will provide conference attendees with methods for pedagogic design, management, delivery and research.
Abstract
The Europe 2020 Strategy cites the achievement of a single digital market as one of its seven initiatives; promoting initiatives that enhance digital literacy, skills and inclusion; with socio-economic polarities cited as the main reason for differences in access and use of web-based technologies. In August 2016 the UK Office for National Statistics stated that 17% of UK households were without internet access. Baroness Martha Lane Fox, 2010 appointee to the position of UK Digital Champion for RaceOnline 2012, stood down after 3 years in the role.
The paper discusses various forms of access to architectural digital culture in terms of the accesses to the semiotics governing its use and will discuss how, in terms of the construction of traditionalist communities of practice and academic tribes, prospective learners from WP, and BAME, backgrounds are forced to enter into a range of detribalisation and displacement processes. The paper posits that true design education is an endemically inclusive and ethnically exploratory analytical practice that in its purest and primordial sense seeks to unearth the full breadth of human living expertise.
Questionnaires will be used to gather disseminate a range of experiences of current WP and BAME learners on UAL programmes, to identify issues at pre application and undergraduate education stages. The technologies used in the application and undergraduate education stages of WP and BAME learners act as a divisive inhibitor to the equal access to learning, education and the wider profession. If prospective learners are unaware of the conventions of language and presentation due to cultural differences they are left with a decision to make. Do they decide to go through a process of detribalization, striping themselves of the core cultural sympathies that lead them to consider applying to study architecture in the first place or do they choose to assert and maintain their ethno-cultural political position, essentially playing both sides?
During the higher education process the design, planning and delivery of learning by teachers can greatly affect WP and BAME learners’ ability to maintain their identities. This may take the form of assimilationist adaptations and revisions of applications to and the employment of core variables such as design agendas and processes, communication of ideas and the platforms used to disseminate and discussed ideas online, in turn, affecting studio delivery. The potentialities of these processes of detribalisation result in the loss of authentic primary research agendas that inform academically orientated design dialogue.