The moving image has always been the subject of sustained interest by architects, architectural educators and theorists since the invention of cinema. In the Twenty-first century, terms such as ‘virtual’ and ‘digital’ are common denominators in the discourse across various disciplines, including architecture. The 2000s gave rise to a significant amount of scholarship on the relationship between architecture and digital narrative practices such as film, animation, video games, and, more recently, narrative pieces of virtual and augmented reality. Simultaneous with these developments, leading architecture schools established courses concentrated on film and digitalnarrative media. Post-graduate degrees focused on time-based media were devised; film and animation were taught in parallel with other ‘narrative’ digital practices such as virtual reality. These explorations into novel means of thinking, design and representation via the moving image gained a foothold in the curriculum of several architecture schools around the globe and architects and students became actively involved in this significant trend.

This trend demonstrates that radical changes are under way and have already reformed curricula in the realm of architectural education; prominent scholars in the field such as Francois Penz consider the introduction of cinema studies an “an essential and necessary antidote” for a discipline that is dominated by digital images, virtual spaces and walk-through, fly-throughs animations.

Digital narrative practices are an integral part of current architectural education, however, systematic studies into the design pedagogy of the digital narrative practices are rare and this fertile ground is relatively unexplored.

Symposium 

The symposium, Spatio-temporal tales: Design Pedagogies ofDigital Narrative Practices at the Centre of Architecture and Visual Arts (CAVA) at the University ofLiverpool is a platform guided by a shared passion for the pedagogy of digital media that can function as means of spatial storytelling about the past, future and realities of the fictive and real architectural and urban spaces; this includes digital practices such as film, animation, video game, VR and AR. 

This symposium seeks to concentrate exclusively on the notion of ‘pedagogy’ which is rarely addressed as the primary concept within the field. It is hoped that the tight focus on pedagogy and charting the education of digital narrative practices will suggest new directions for research in this area, considering both historical and recent advancements. This forum asks: What are the pedagogies, teaching methods, theories and approaches in the context of digital narrative practices? How cant he discipline of architecture inform its own pedagogies, languages and systems for digital narrative practices? How can the emergence of digital narrative practices change architectural education and its structure? What are the pedagogies of digital narrative practices, both now and historically? How can the discipline of architecture and its educational structure assimilate into the screen/virtual oriented culture of the Twenty-first century?  

Spatio-temporal Tales: Design Pedagogies of Digital Narrative Practices aims to demonstrate that these questions and themes are not only relevant from a research perspective, but are posed to address an urgent need within the domain of architectural education and its priorities.