Transparency In Information Architecture: Enabling Large Scale Creative Collaboration in Architectural Education over the Internet

This paper is about networked collaboration in architectural education and about information architecture for networked collaborations. It presents results of a quantitative process analysis of two types of courses in Computer Aided Architectural Design that were taught using database-driven online environments. The main focus of the quantitative analysis is the performance of these online environments as information structures, designed to accommodate the presentation and the peer-to-peer exchange of design information for relatively large groups of between 60 and 150 participants. Using the database records to reconstruct the processes, three different quantitative analyses are described. Their results indicate that for these projects the web-environments were successful in enhancing peer-to-peer learning and that they promoted a more objective assessment of the submitted works. The study also looks at the effect that the environments themselves had on the process. Finally it draws some conclusions about these environments' information architecture: it presents tentative guidelines about how such environments must be designed to handle the dynamic display of design data, from many different authors, in a way that is transparent to the users.