Spatial design outcomes of indoor soundscaping course as part of interior architecture education

Abstract

Indoor soundscaping is a multi-disciplinary field that integrates, sound, user experience, and architecture. At its core, it has the potential to redefine any enclosed acoustic environment. It nor solely considers the theories and methods of architectural acoustics or depends only on noise management techniques, yet primarily focus on user, perception, expectation, and experience. Through this perspective, listening to spaces should be an active act of an interior architect; an awareness that should be gained during the early years of architectural education. The elective course with the same name, 'Listening to Spaces' has been offered to interior architecture students since 2015 at Çankaya University, Ankara, Turkey under the Department of Interior Architecture, with the aim of implementing an important additional topic specific course to the present education curriculum of the Department as the course combines architectural, spatial and functional analysis methods from an acoustical perspective, in order to raise awareness on conscious listening of spaces with different functions. The course is conducted through interactive learning bases and the orientation is more research-based than teaching-based, although basic acoustical and soundscape theoretical knowledge is given. Students are expected to accomplish 6 tasks progressively following the cognitive processing dimensions parallel to Bloom's taxonomy. The outcomes of the tasks and the final spatial design proposals has been evaluated and discussed as part of this study to highlight the importance of topic specific course integration to architectural design education.