In architectural design education, the virtual design studios were initially created around 1993 from many school across the world. That was about 18 years. The virtual design studio is the collaborative settings in teaching and learning using only digital environments for various tasks used in analogue world of the design education. In general, the  ‘virtual’ is referred to the method of communication and exchange of design and ideas among participants.

Most often issue found in the earlier virtual design studios comparing to the present was in fact the lack of collaboration and communication. Why was that?  My speculation was that around early 1990s the use of online or digital communication and mobile device seems to be new to everyone. It might not have been easy to use such to communicate among ourselves. However, these days the familiarity of mobile device usage, online discussion and social networking through the internet is everywhere and become a part of our lives. So, now we don’t feel awkward in using such media for everyday life, including in academia.

Additionally, there are widely usages of the internet and technology for communication and collaboration in the architectural professional as well. Form my own experiences, often times, we can collaborate our work with engineers, consultants and our clients just virtually. Sometimes, I have never seen an engineer consulting for years and years has passed by but we accomplished our professional work, successfully.

So, what does this mean to us? We, professional people, become to trust the technology much much more than academic institutions trust their students, professors, scholars, etc. The professionals definitely use the digital technology advantage in collaboration and communication with our own risk. We do lose some information, such as files corrupted, inaccessible at times, etc., all as our learning curves, but doable and professionally.

Though it has been only 18 years using digital as a tool for architectural design (education and professionals). I am wondering and looking forward to seeing what will be the next big things that we could take advantage from the unforeseen and upcoming technology to advance our design education and professionals.

paperless studio: http://ci.columbia.edu/ci/subjects/profiles/arch_profile0.html