Profile: Nancy Cheng

For Architecture professor Nancy Cheng, technology has always been a part of teaching and learning. In 1992, she and several fellow graduate students experimented with designing through online collaboration, a number of years before the web hit critical mass. Nancy was interested in exploring how “the technical, social, and design parts come together.”

Now that Nancy teaches architectural design and computer methods, she continues to explore how those elements fit together. While teaching classes on Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch-Up, she has experimented with using wikis and e-portfolios in her classes, sometimes with surprising results.

During the term, students posted their projects and explanations of their work in their e-portfolios. “I was astounded at the depth of understanding that some of the students, who were very rudimentary with their graphic skills, revealed through their work,” Cheng said. “That was the biggest revelation for me.”

Cheng is continuing to explore the intersection of design, architecture and education in several ways at once. Cheng and several graduate students have been working with a computer-controlled router to carve designs into wood. They taught several class sessions in the McKenzie Collaboration Center, using the SMART Boards and the design software Rhino.

She is also developing course work around building information models, which are information rich, three-dimensional models. “Instead of making rectangular shapes, you are building walls that are brick, that have insulation and chipboard on the inside. There’s lots of data,” Cheng said. “It’s a centralized, 3 dimensional repository for all the members of the building project team.”