Pina Petricone Hosts Design Research Internship for Daniels Faculty Students at GPA

June 3, 2021

Prin­ci­pal Pina Pet­ri­cone has host­ed the first ever ses­sion of ARC399 – Design Research Intern­ship at GPA. The class of 12 stu­dents were all in the process of com­plet­ing their under­grad­u­ate degrees at the Daniels Fac­ul­ty of Archi­tec­ture, Land­scape & Design at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to. The two-week inten­sive course was designed with the inten­tion of offer­ing stu­dents an oppor­tu­ni­ty to build skills in design research with­in pro­fes­sion­al projects. The stu­dents were able to devel­op their visu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills by exe­cut­ing both indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive work to the Atlas of Light Oper­a­tions, which is a com­pendi­um of select­ed cus­tom light fix­tures, both built and ren­dered, from a range of GPA projects.

The course­work began with an exam­i­na­tion of var­i­ous prece­dents for the pre­sen­ta­tion of design research and mod­els for graph­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion as well as an overview of the GPA port­fo­lio. Stu­dents began ana­lyz­ing draw­ings, con­struc­tion pho­tos, ren­der­ings, and plans for each project con­tain­ing a cus­tom fix­ture. Work­ing togeth­er to explore dif­fer­ent method­olo­gies of dis­play­ing research, the stu­dents com­bined work led to the over­all design which was then pop­u­lat­ed by the draw­ings of each stu­dent, tak­ing cre­ative lib­er­ties to under­stand the con­text, qual­i­ty, and usage of their assigned light fix­ture. The course was a great suc­cess with the intend­ed goal of work­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly and effec­tive­ly with­in the GPA body of work, shar­ing, artic­u­lat­ing, and cri­tiquing the design process, as well as com­plet­ing a crit­i­cal research project. See full sto­ry here.