Architecture is as much a part of the information age and economy as any other business, and computer literacy in the applications that design professionals use in their work is an important part of one's education. Furthermore, the increasing shift of continuing professional education from the traditional conference setting to online delivery makes it important for students to develop online learning skills in order to continue their education, even if online learning is not a significant part of undergraduate education.

Like other college students, architecture students must have basic literacy in Internet communications, word processing, and spreadsheets; however, there is much more they need to know. Ten years ago, at the dawn of the Internet age, Australian native William Mitchell (then dean of architecture and planning, and now head of MIT's program in Media Arts and Sciences and its Media Laboratory) identified the range of digital technologies coming into use (Mitchell and McCullough, 1995). These applications include:

• computer operating systems and networks
• numerical processing
• word and text processing
• database management
• sounds
• image manipulation
• 2-D and 3-D geometry (drafting)
• surface modeling and rendering
• solid modeling
• motion modeling
• animation
• prototyping and computer-aided manufacturing
• virtual design studios

Communications technologies are a key element in the profession's future. In his book, Cyberplaces, and its associated website, www.cyberplaces.com/home.htm, architect Paul Doherty identifies a critical emerging role for the construction industry: the construction information manager. Since the mid-1960's, architects have ceded much of the responsibility for overseeing the construction process to an emerging profession of construction managers; their willingness to embrace information management may affect whether they retain a leadership role or lose even more influence. The traditional two-dimensional plans that an architect creates are used primarily for construction; an electronic model of the building is of long-term importance for the client in budgeting, marketing, property management, facility maintenance, and planning for future change. "Information technology management solutions are abundant for those with the insight to understand that harnessing the power of information is a necessity for today's construction projects ... If architects do not address their clients' information needs, someone else will." Doherty, 2000, p. 574.

Computer-aided drafting and design (CAD) software is as critical to designers in architecture and engineering as word processing is to the writer or a graphics/photo editing program is to the graphic designer. While all architecture schools in the United States have CAD labs, finding the resources to equip, staff and maintain them has been a challenge. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the 86 computers in three computer labs are maintained by 3 part-time network administrators, working 48 hours a week between them; the labs are run largely by the students themselves, and all computer training is done by students (in contrast, the library employs five staff members in addition to to student assistants). Many students have computers at their desks in the studio, and carry their files around on pen-sized flash memory dives. Design studios are being wired into the school's network; ownership of laptop computers is now being required by individual schools of architecture if not by their parent universities.

The software most widely used in the industry and in schools is AutoDesk's AutoCAD. Most schools offer an introductory class in CAD—given the complexity of the program, this is enough so that a student can use the computer to create a set of two-dimensional plans that can be printed out on the school's large-format plotters. Given accreditation requirements and the fact that almost all architectural firms now use CAD rather than producing construction documents by hand, this course is often required as part of the core curriculum.

Many schools also offer one or two more advanced classes as electives, teaching students how to create three-dimensional drawings in CAD (creating surfaces and solid objects rather than simply lines) and using CAD or even more specialized programs to "render" these computer models (applying materials, lighting, etc.) to create more realistic images that can be observed from any viewpoint. These programs are used primarily for visual representation, testing the appearance of the design, rather than for scientific analysis. In contrast, engineering schools use programs that model the properties and behavior of these computer constructs, such as their structural behavior or energy usage.

AutoCAD model of a front porch	AutoCAD model of the Queen Mary

Most CAD programs are designed to produce detailed technical drawings for construction, and are difficult to learn and use. Many students—largely on their own—have discovered a 3-D modeling program, SketchUp, that is particularly well suited to the conceptual design stage. The program is exceedingly easy to use, contributing to its phenomenal success (Khemlani, 2002, 2004b). It allows the user to create rendered, shaded 3-D models, which can be rotated and viewed onscreen, and to conduct walk-thoughs and animations. Unlike the more sophisticated models such as form•Z and AutoCAD, the user can work in all three dimensions simultaneously, rather than on 2-dimensional planes.

SketchUp program output by novice user (the author).
(Click here for animated version.)

Popular alternatives to AutoCAD include full-featured form•Z (Wilson, 2002), ArchiCAD, and budget-priced DataCAD. In practice, these programs put additional burdens on the students, who will be less employable if they have not also mastered AutoCAD. Learning multiple computer programs is becoming a practical necessity: to achieve more sophisticated, photorealistic rendering with lighting effects, a 3D model created in one program is often exported to another more specialized program, such as AutoDesk's 3D Studio Max.

Another program for 3-D modeling is Revit, now owned and marketed by AutoDesk. This program offers a technological advance over 2-D and 3-D CAD programs, in that the 3-D models are the basis for a building information management (BIM) system. Each object described in the model is part of a database, and can carry with it extensive information, such as the physical characteristics of materials or the cost, make and model of the product that is depicted. It is the information in a BIM system that engineers and cost estimators need to make their calculations, and that building owners are increasingly asking architects to provide.

Revit program output. From Khemlani, 2004a.

Learning how to create images in 3-D design and rendering programs is not the only information technology skill that a student must master; they must also learn to communicate their ideas to others. In the collegiate studio, design reviews are conducted in a face-to-face setting where all are present at the same time, and the scope of the review is limited. In the real world, design work involves contributions from many collaborators, who cannot always be brought together at the same time for an in-person review. Different reviewers will need different amounts of time to examine the design in detail. Programs such as eDrawings (Jankowski, 2003) respond to these workplace realities, offering the ability for designs to be marked-up by a remote user; the designer can then import the changes into the original drawing/model. AutoDesk's now-abandoned Architectural Studio (Khemlani, 2003, 2004c) allowed the markup process to occur synchronously onine, much like the "whiteboards" found in online course management platforms such as Blackboard and WebCT. Standard programs such as AutoCAD now allow drawings to be formatted for viewing on the Internet, supplemental viewing and markup software allows remote users to manipulate designs and propose changes without modifying the underlying model.

University of California, Berkeley professor Yehuda Kalay in his book, Architecture's New Media (Kalay, 2004a), describes the progress in digital technologies that has been made since William Mitchell's prophetic book. However, while most architectural students are becoming nominally CAD-literate, the potential of this medium for initial conceptualization of designs and as a digital communications medium is largely overlooked in the studio. According to Khemlani, "schools are teaching architectural design in a somewhat fragmented fashion, forcing students to learn CAD programs in one class and design principles in another. 'Architectural CAD tools are pretty complicated to use. It takes a significant amount of time to learn a program and design instructors see it as a distraction. Design studio classes are often taught by instructors from an earlier generation. They feel more comfortable using pen and paper and are not too keen on designing with CAD'...In other words, these instructors see CAD as a hindrance to creativity." (Wong, 2003, page 2, ¶ 3). CAD is used primarily as a tool to finalize designs originally conceived on paper and to make perspective drawings. These are then printed out or plotted on paper and presented in the studio in a traditional fashion. In studios in which the design critic discourages (or even prohibits) the use of CAD, these drawings are retraced to appear as if they were drawn by hand.

The use of digital design media in the architectural curriculum has a critical limiting factor: the ability and willingness of faculty to teach using this medium. Because the faculty are generally not as computer-literate as the students, the great majority of work in the design studio continues to be done in pencil on tracing paper and by building cardboard models. Over a four or five-year period, most students will be lucky to have one studio in which the digital medium is used to conceive, illustrate, and communicate design concepts. While students can be required to learn CAD, academia is not an arena where the teaching staff can be mandated to develop this competency. As a result, computer literacy among faculty at most schools is concentrated in a small group of individuals who have made teaching with technology a personal goal.

The anomaly of students being more competent in a medium than their instructors arises for several reasons. Studio faculty, having relied on their ability to draw throughout their careers, insist that students need to be able to sketch and draw to be able to express their ideas quickly. As long as an architect has a a writing implement and a surface to draw on, he or she can capture an idea that comes to mind. One does not always have a computer at hand, and manipulating its controls can distract from capturing the essence of an idea. Furthermore, drawings produced by CAD, by their nature, are too precise for conceptual work. These faculty members regard CAD as a tool for making final drawings, not for sketching out rough ideas in the initial design stages. As time goes on, the increasing portability and ease of use of computing systems tend to undercut these arguments.

One reason for the gap in computer literacy may be that full-time faculty do not have the same imperative to learn and use computer-aided design as do the students. For students, CAD skills are a prerequisite for employment. Using CAD is not a skill that design instructors need to master unless they also practice architecture—something that most adjunct faculty members (who teach only about one-sixth of the full-time equivalent teaching hours) do for a living, while full-time faculty may practice only on a part-time basis, if at all (NAAB, 2004d). Learning a single program is time-consuming, and may take a year of frequent use before one is proficient. Learning how to use digital technologies well enough to teach design, using them as the primary medium, demands that one become immersed in the technology.

Another dynamic may be at work, relating to a "studio culture" in which the instructor is the expert source of knowledge. This instructor is placed at a disadvantage and loses a degree of authority when dealing with students who have a higher level of skill using the computer. The design critic in a traditional setting can show a student an idea through a quick sketch or overlay, but is unlikely to have that same facility in digital media. The point the instructor is trying to make could easily get lost while fumbling around with the student's computer and potentially messing up the student's work (a serious breach of protocol). Even having to take turns with the student using the mouse and keyboard changes the dynamic of the desk crit, raising the level of formality.

Using computers in the design studio has practical limitations that could make a critic hesitant to try it. One cannot easily mark up a previously drawn idea, or put a piece of tracing paper over a computer monitor to sketch out the next iteration. One cannot paw through a stack of sketches and place them side by side to see how an idea has developed, or compare different variations. A desk crit conducted in front of a computer screen becomes a more private meeting, less likely to involve or be observed by other students. The sketches can't be pinned up on a wall for everyone to see, nor will students be able to casually observe their classmates' work as it develops from one day to the next. The critic cannot walk through the studio and scan for promising ideas, since they are not lying out in plain sight on a table top.

The typical design studio will be filled with balsa and carboard study models, used by students to explore their design ideas in three dimensions. Making virtual 3-D models using a CAD system can save a lot of time for students and allow them to explore many more alternatives (as well as avoiding sliced fingertips); however, but learning how to do so is even more difficult than learning to draw 2-D plans. The instructor who can't "pick up" and examine the model, but must rely on the student alter the viewpoint to display a new perspective, is placed at a psychological disadvantage.

Non-design faculty, teaching technical subjects in more traditional settings, have even less opportunity to use CAD than studio faculty, making it difficult for them to show students how to integrate these subjects into their design methodology. Their ability to employ other computer technologies in their teaching is also limited. Classrooms equipped with teacher workstations and data projection systems are hard to come by, and reserving the computer lab for a scheduled class may be difficult when students from many different sections need access to work on their projects.

Faculty members who teach courses that rely heavily on visual imagery, such as architectural history and theory courses, are most likely to use digital technologies. The slide projector has been replaced by the PowerPoint presentation. The extensive slide libraries in architecture schools, with tens or hundreds of thousands of slides, are gradually being digitized, while the visual resources available on the World Wide Web such as Great Buildings Online (http://www.greatbuildings.com/) provide a rich resource for research and exploration.

The digital "generation gap" between students and faculty is less pronounced in practice, but it exists. It has been reported that half of architects—generally, the most senior—do not use CAD on a routine basis. "Most still relied on hand sketching and other forms of design manipulation and left CAD to the 'drafting pool' of interns and junior-architectural staff whose job was turning out 2D construction documents." (Williams, 2003, ¶ 1). Williams attributes this to "busy architects with little time to learn complex tools" and "CAD that requires too much time to learn and still comes off as less than intuitive." (¶ 4). "Many larger architectural firms today are still run by designers from a pre-CAD era who honed their non-CAD skills over many years" (¶ 12). Nevertheless, these technologies have taken hold and have revolutionized practice, with computer terminals replacing the drafting board.

Architect's office: Japan	Architect's office: Northern Virginia

The design studio continues to prepare students for a role as an individual creative genius whose talent is rewarded with complete freedom over all aspects of design, demanding little or no attention budget or construction feasibility. In practice, design is a collaborative endeavor involving many parties with diverse skills and outlooks—the client or facility owner, the user or tenant (if not the owner), the architect, engineering consultants, project and construction managers, contractors, subcontractors, fabricators, suppliers, regulators, and many others. The Internet boom of the late 1990's saw the emergence of groupware and online intranets specifically designed to meet the need for collaboration and communication on construction projects. Commercial tools such as AutoCAD's Architectural Studio have made it possible for multiple parties to work together on designs over the Internet (Khemlani, 2003).

Such technologies can foster a level of communication and collaboration that is impossible to achieve in the traditional design studio. In one application, Janine Clifford conducted a design class with 11 students from Harvard University from her office in Hawaii, working on a real project in Honolulu. Design reviews included the mayor of Honolulu and other city officials. Employing a combination of emails, videoconferencing, FTP, and design reviews where students showed their progress on Autodesk Architectural Studio, with real-time markups and design suggestions made by Clifford back in Hawaii, the class provided more teacher-student contact than many on-campus courses" (¶ 10) where "visiting" faculty "would be on campus for just a few days each month, and the rest of the time, students worked on their own" (¶ 8). Despite such demonstrations, insufficient sales in a highly volatile software market led AutoDesk to withdraw the product as of September 15, 2004 (Khemlani, 2004b).

Collaboration among widely-dispersed members of the construction team has become standard practice, and is an indispensable feature of the global economy. It extends far beyond sharing files on a computer network, demanding that practitioners develop a facility with all types of digital media and communications. A videoconference with two-way audio, video, and computer connections among six offices of an architectural-engineering firm spanning the North American continent (part of a regular schedule of Friday afternoon in-house training sessions) is illustrated below.

Videoconferencing among six design offices across the United States

Computerization has led to the concept of the "digital design studio." By the early 1980's, Donald Greenberg, an architecture professor and head of the Cornell University computer graphics program (http://www.graphics.cornell.edu), had pioneered many of the solid modeling, rendering and lighting algorithms used in today's computer graphics programs. He predicted that computer graphics would bring about a revolution in the architectural design process (Greenberg, 1984). Since then, however, most of Greenberg's work, like that of his rival, Nicholas Negroponte at the MIT Media Lab (http://www.media.mit.edu/), has been employed in fields other than architecture, such as medical imaging, computer games, and Hollywood filmmaking. In the United States, only a small group of architectural educators who make the use of digital media a normal part of their work with students has emerged.

These faculty members are able to create sophisticated 3-D models that can be viewed from any angle, realistically rendered, illuminated, shaded, and placed in digital recreations of actual sites. They can show their students how to design with the digital media, even from the earliest conceptual stages. They are learning—and teaching students—how to animate their designs, doing "walk-throughs" and "fly-bys" to test their design concepts in ways that could never be done with static sketches and perspectives. They have learned how to use graphic design skills and digital photography to create presentations with Adobe Photoshop, or animated presentations with Macromedia Flash. Using Apple's QuickTime VR, they are creating simulations and interactive environments where the user can choose his or her viewpoint, look around, or direct his or her own path through the building They are comfortable with the new media, and are exploring its capabilities.

These educators are active in four principal organizations focused on architectural computer graphics:

• North America: ACADIA — Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (http://www.acadia.org; founded 1981).
• Europe: eCAADe — Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe (http://www.ecaade.org; founded 1983).
• Asia: CAADRIA — The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (http://www.caadria.org/caadria/; founded 1996).
• Latin America: SIGraDi — Sociedad Iberoamericana de Grafica Digital (http://www.sigradi.org/; first conference 1997).

These organizations each organize annual conferences, and are jointly responsible for the online International Journal of Architectural Computing (http://www.architecturalcomputing.org/html/jour/about.shtml; http://zerlina.ingentaselect.com/vl=5764279/cl=51/nw=1/rpsv/cw/mscp/14780771/v1n1/contp1.htm). An extensive body of literature from conferences, journals, and The Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction (http://itcon.org)—most of it originating outside the U.S.—has emerged (see Digital Design Bibliography). Other European organizations promoting educational applications of CAD include:

• EAAE — European Association for Architectural Education (http://www.eaae.be/eaaenieuw/info.php?home=1; founded 1975)
• CAAD Futures Foundation (http://www.caadfutures.arch.tue.nl/; founded 1985)
• AVOCAAD — Added Value of Computer Aided Architectural Design (http://www.avocaad.org/; founded 1995)

The use of digital technologies in architectural education is more widespread in Europe than in the United States, where these educators are usually a small minority among faculty. Many schools claim to have a digital media program or center, and most prominently feature sophisticated CAD drawings in their brochures and websites, but few have more than three courses concentrating on digital media. This number may cover the teaching load of only one faculty member, making it difficult to make digital design a full-time pursuit.

A few schools of architecture have organized design studios where digital technologies are the primary working medium. They have built undergraduate, master's, and even doctoral programs and research programs around these studios. Some of these leading schools include:

• the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
• the University of Washington,
• the University of Oregon,
• Texas A&M,
• the University of California, Berkeley,
• the Georgia Institute of Technology, and
• Columbia University.

Overseas schools include Hong Kong University, the University of Sydney, and many schools in Europe.

Design Studio of the Future, MIT from Mitchell, 2000	Contemporary design studio, IIT

Educational advantages. The use of digital media can enhance the education of an architect in several ways. First, it trains the architect to think in multiple dimensions of space and time, and allows the student to work with real objects rather than abstractions. In a traditional setting, a wall is represented by a line on a piece of paper: a graphic symbol that requires interpretation. By itself, it conveys little information other than its location, direction and length. Such a symbol is ambiguous, having many possible meanings: the same line could represent something tangible, such as an edge, a joint, or a boundary; it could also be a symbol of something more intangible, such as a geometric axis, a ray of light, or a trajectory. A series of lines could be simply a 2-dimensional pattern, but could also represent a cube, a wire frame, two parallel surfaces connected by rods at the corners, an open box, a patform that rises from one level to another. Interpreting an architect's drawings can be an art in itself.

Ambiguous shapes: a line, a square (?) and a cube (?)

People do not experience their environment from a bird's-eye plan view. For the subtleties of the designer's plan to become apparent to anyone other than another architect, it must be created with the perspective of the user in mind. The design student working with a computer is no longer limited to putting symbols (lines) on a flat surface, but can manipulate objects in three-dimensional space. Suddenly, the wall has many more properties: height, thickness, color, texture, mass, transparency, reflectance. It is no longer an abstraction, but something that people can experience—it gains meaning. In the traditional studio, this third dimension is explored through perspective drawings (taken from the most advantageous viewpoint) and study models. Given the time it takes to construct these drawings and models, relatively few alternative designs can be analyzed.

Besides opening up the third dimension, the digital medium also allows the student to explore the dimension of time and to simulate motion. Although architecture has been described as "frozen music," a building is not a static object. It varies depending upon the movement of the person experiencing it; it varies with the sun and the seasons; and the building itself may a dynamic object. The subtle structural movements in a building and the changes in heat gain and air movement that accompany a daily thermal cycle were once only examined by structural and mechanical engineers. The flapping "wings" of Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum illustrate how structures can be designed to change their shape in response to the environment.

The second area in which the digital medium can enrich design education is in promoting the integration of knowledge acquired outside the studio and applying it in a design problem. Construction of a three-dimensional virtual model necessarily means that students must apply their knowledge of methods and materials. They must think about and select the materials that go into their building. They must figure out how a window fits into a wall, and how that wall connects the roof.

The third major area of improvement is in facilitating the critical final step of reflection and evaluation found in problem-based education (thereby attaining the "highest" educational objective in Bloom's taxonomy and completing the Kolb's full experiential learning cycle). In Kalay's terms (Kalay, 2004a), evaluation is the glue that binds goal definition and synthesis together in the design process. As noted by Kvan, the digital record of the development of an idea allows decisions to be reexamined and revisited. A design is no longer "cast in stone" because the student no longer has time to develop new drawings and perspective renderings. The final jury is no longer solely a culminating event focused on the final product, but an opportunity to review the entire process through which each design was conceived and has evolved.

Beyond CAD, graphics, and animation. A handful of schools are exploring totally-immersive virtual reality environments or "caves" in which the user's physical movements take them through an environment projected on a 360° screen (see, e.g., the University of Southern Mississippi engineering school's "Holodeck"). While some are searching for ever-more realistic ways of depicting actual spaces, others are seeking to make virtual space more like real spaces. Berkeley's Kalay argues that virtual spaces—the Internet domains where people gather online to work, study or play— should be designed around an architectural metaphor rather than the prevailing "document" metaphor, in order to give users a sense of place providing added meaning and embodying social and cultural values. Kalay, 2004b.

While the availability and sophistication of computer graphics technology are important factors, digital design programs depend on the faculty's willingness to bring technology into the studio. At Cornell, the top-rated school for several years running, only a single section (12-15 students a year) is constituted as a digital design studio. The overwhelming majority of graduate students in the school's computer graphics program—a prime source of leaders in firms such as Sony Pictures, Pixar Studios and Industrial Light and Magic—have degrees in computer science and electrical engineering. Art and architecture students whose interest lies primarily with the artistic application of computer graphics are generally ill-prepared to undertake research studies involving significant mathematical and scientific content and extensive programming, and are encouraged to apply elsewhere.

The most significant impact of computer technologies is their role as a medium of communication. MIT's William Mitchell has pointed out that the use of technical drawings made it possible for the architect to operate away from the building site, and investigate the feasibility of various designs without first having to build them (Kalay, 2004a, Foreword). Reproduction technology allowed complex construction operations to be organized among geographically separated parties. The Internet now provides opportunities for information sharing and collaborative work in design beyond the confines of the design studio, providing at least one way to address the Boyer Report's findings that architectural education must develop stronger connections with the profession, the industry, and the community.

Architecture schools are using the Internet in much the same way as other academic units. While every one has a web page (see Links), these pages do not consistently demonstrate a mastery of organization, design, or communication that one would expect of schools devoted to teaching design. Some schools' home pages are Macromedia Flash-driven works of kinetic art that show off the author's digital imagery and animation skills, but are entirely dysfunctional from the standpoint of the user, who must struggle with unprintable pages, links that don't work, images that jump around on the screen, and red or gray text with insufficient contrast to be readable on the popular black background (even at the otherwise carefully-designed MIT site). Many schools have not deployed sufficient web-literate personnel or the resources to keep their pages up to date.

A school's homepage is itself a collaborative effort in comnmunication that requires contributions from all quarters. Many schools feature online galleries of student and faculty work. In some cases, a conscientious effort has been made to create a consistent image and navigation based on a well-designed template, to provide detailed course descriptions beyond the catalog descriptions on the University-controlled server, and even detailed syllabi. Some schools, such as North Carolina State University, have even managed to secure biographical data from most or all of their faculty members.

The Web presence of most schools does not extend beyond the basic administrative pages. Architecture faculty and their courses have significantly smaller web presence than others in the university at large, reflecting the same insularity complained of in the Boyer Report. While the parent institution may have hundreds of courses and several entire degree programs online, few architecture courses are among them. The few individual faculty or course home pages is indicative of either a low level of web literacy among faculty, or a low support and cooperation for those who would like to have more of a web presence.

The most "connected" part of an architecture school may be its library, linked to (and getting technical support from) the university's main library and to architectural resources all over the World Wide Web. While lacking any design sophistication, the online resources at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas architectural library is an outstanding example of how extensive digital resources on architecture can be made available to students and the public.

Virtual design studios. The "virtual" design studio uses the cummunications capability of technology to expand the digital design studio beyond the confines of a single location. According to the Univerity of Utah's Julio Bermudez, the virtual design studio represents the future of architectural education (Bermudez, 1999). While it may not be possible (or even advisable) to remove students from the design studio, the Internet has made it possible to link studios with design critics, clients and other studios in different locations in North and South America, Asia, Oceana, and Europe. Since 1993, the year the Internet first became accessible to the public, a few institutions—MIT, University of Oregon, Hong Kong University, and Texas A&M among them—have conducted these virtual design studios, joining with others around the world to work on collaborative studio projects, conducting juries, reviews and even desk crits online with guest experts. Different time zones have been used to advantage, permitting the studio project to operate around the clock in North America, Europe and Asia (Hischberg, 1999. Language barriers have presented surprisingly few difficulties for those who are communicating in the language of design.

Susan Yee describes ten of these virtual design studios involving MIT in detail (Yee, 2001); Guillermo Vasquez de Velasco describes the collaborative efforts among Texas A&M and a network of Latin American schools (Vasquez, 1999). Some of these experiments have been heavy on the use of equipment, with up to seven video cameras (and their attendant personnel) at some locations, electronic bridges, computers and multiple large-screen monitors, tying groups of participants to properly-equipped venues and scheduled communication time slots. Nevertheless, they have succeeded in proving the feasibility of the concept, despite technologies and bandwidth limitations that would now seem primitive. As technology continues to become more powerful, faster, cheaper, smaller, more mobile, and easier to use, the collaborative design efforts that are becoming commonplace in the industtry will become increasingly feasible—and necessary—in the academic environment. The extent to which distance education is employed in architecture may be low, but the virtual design studio demonstrates that innovative distance education techniques can be used effectively in teaching unconventional subjects to unconventional learners.