Year Four Design
The Fourth year of the design tripos provides students with the opportunity to demonstrate creativity and mastery in design and at least one of the fundamental disciplines, using theoretical, experimental and/or computational methods. Both studio and dissertation projects make use of the knowledge and skills developed in first three years of the degree and the nature of the project will be determined partly by the pathway taken.
The emphasis in this year is on research led exploration of design, materials science and engineering. Students choose design projects and dissertations topics based on their own interests and work closely on them with research and design supervisors, bringing together all the skills and knowledge they have acquired. They will be expected where appropriate to liaise with industry and to be able to carry out work independently and in teams.
There is one compulsory paper, Professional Practice, which covers aspects of the economics and finance of design projects and looks at the legal aspects in greater depth. Students are free to sit any other papers in the Architecture and Design Triposes and are encouraged to explore lectures and other papers offered by the University that might be relevant to their chosen areas of exploration. Students are appointed supervisors for their studio and dissertation projects.
Each year the fourth year studio moves to a different place and explores the design issues in that place. The students choose to work at a certain scale on solutions they think are particularly relevant to the location. So the student might suggest a new form of building construction or design a skyscraper or they might make a tent or a new type of deployable structure. Students are expected to provide a written report to accompany their studio project explaining the rationale behind the project, with calculations to demonstrate its performance as well as drawings and models showing its form. Each project is designed to meet the requirements of civil/structural engineering accreditation and architectural accreditation.
The research project is a sustained piece of research culminating in written report of 5-7,000 words in length. Students choose from list of research projects and details of the requirements are made available at the beginning the year. These projects are designed to enable the students to explore laboratory work or programming and to work on genuine research projects being developed by researchers in the University. The research project may be used to inform the studio work but that is not a requirement. Each project is designed to meet the requirements of both civil/structural engineering accreditation and architectural accreditation.
This course is designed to provide a thorough grounding in the professional side of design practice, including running a business, finance, law and legislation, proving students with a firm grounding for entering design practice and towards professional accreditation.