Designing for Resilience: Pedagogical Models for Engaging Infrastructural Design Problems with a User-Centric Mindset

Infrastructural systems operate in increasingly dynamic environments that present a complexifying array of hazards. As legacy systems are further extended to respond to the demonstrated needs of urban dwellers, it becomes clear a conceptual deficit exists within graduate-level curricula for designing tomorrow’s resilient infrastructure solutions today. Resilient infrastructural solutions require a fundamental reconsideration of design requirements that is informed by original research and best explored first through project-based learning (PBL) design studios in academic departments including architecture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and urban design. How then ought interested infrastructural educators pivot their research attention and teaching assignments toward morphologically indeterminate infrastructural problem spaces, while positioning themselves as the conceptual leaders so desperately needed? This paper presents the direction of design studio curricula to infrastructural design problems, offers insight into how funded research in a hybridized infrastructural type can unlock new pedagogical opportunities, and shares pedagogical case histories for three graduate-level PBL design studios.