The students in the class are asked to follow a process in order to
learn how to design something.

First, you have to look at things to determine what has already been
done that you think is good or bad.  You have to develop your eye and
sense of appropriateness of colour, scale, and composition.  This is
different for eveyrone.  So the next thing you learn is how to talk
about that with other people and make an argument for what you think.

Then, we talk about what motivates design.  Who uses the things we
make?  And how can we as designers understand the needs of the users
more than we do today.  The students area asked to write naratives
about fictional or real people that occupy a certain kind of space.  In
this year's project, it was a one or two room private retreat.  In the
same narative, they answer questions about how the space would be based
on who is using it and for what.

From there, we learn to make things that respond to our understanding.
And in this, everyone in the class goes back to the idea of needing to
explain what they are doing and make an argument for why it works.
Then the class critiques and offeres suggestions on how it might be
better.

This year, we took all of that a few steps further by constructing a
full-size model of a project.  The first item for that phase of our
class was to determine how we would take the fantastic ideas from each
persons individual project and make they into one great thing.  This
can either waterdown ideas or make them stronger.  This particular
class was able to take many GREAT ideas and adapt them to each other in
small ways.  The discussion proceded quite quickly and with a lot of
creative input about how to bring things together.

Finally, the students are asked to build the full-size model.  This
take sa great deal of time, but offers the students an incredible
experience.  It's hard to understand what you are making unless you can
really see it.  Although most people think of architecture as what
happens on the outside of the building, what the students see is how
the inside and outside work together for one experience.  And how the
individual pieces of the project can reinforce the ideas over and over
again.