Often one of the fundamental tools in the life of students which we often receive less guidance for. It is important for architecture students to not only walk in and out of a lecture or seminar without fully grasping the most relevant information or key information leads to be further researched.
A good design lecture note should be concise, structured, and organise. The goal should not be to always capture everything said or read: but the ability to spot key information in parts of seminars and lectures. Then emphasis switches to how these notes are taken, where, and in what manner.
Notetaking serves as a source of personal information. It is a touch more relatable to you than your textbook or design lecture slides by your professor. So, it is absolutely vital that architecture students take special care in producing and using their notes.
According to research, students recall most of their lecture material when they take notes. In design the process, we learn and develop the more we are conscious of our journeys in the design phase. One can only keep track and make improvements only when they have kept and read through related material composed by themselves.
As architecture students, we may not focus so much on preparing for exams but we have to start doing so because of our learning journeys: depending on how far we want to go and achieve in the construction industry, we may have to write a few exams along the way. Therefore, knowing how to compile notes will go a long way in achieving those high grades.
Here are a few tips and guides to help design students to capture, collate and organise their weekly lecture notes.
It starts from knowing who you are as a student. You have to understand how your retention rate and how to feed it. Pay attention to your learning style. Are you a coloured note person? An all-caps person? Have a more vocal recording brain? All these sorts of questions need to be answered personally in order to strategize and adapt one’s learning techniques.
We can only get better if we practice. Just as everything, practice makes perfect. Practicing strategic weekly note-taking will go a long way to help you get better at sourcing relevant information quicker and more effectively than sitting and compiling weeks’ worth of lecture notes and textbook references. This technique is more affirmed by rewriting one’s own words and reading over a couple of times.
It is also important to realise that above all, we are not just students, we are design students and so physical organisation of notetaking space, is key. The effective use of good spacing and incorporating sketches in our notetaking during and after lectures will be key to our success. As we are more likely to recollect a string of processes, actions, and meanings by visually analysing a sketch drawn by ourselves.
To further elaborate the above, aim to divide notepad or tablet notebook space into sections. For instance, you may want to divide your sheet into main and prompt sections. Where you decide to put headings, key points on one side and expand on those in the main section of the page. This enables you to carefully colour your notes distinctively and clearly to help in retention.
Bonus: when you are a few weeks away from a project submission or exams, it is useful to develop a questionnaire related to the subject or design problem and try to sort answers first-hand from what you can recall in memory before revisiting sketches, notes, and textbooks.
Knowing how hectic and intense architecture studies can be, it is important as design students to adopt these techniques of efficient recordkeeping to help make the most of the hours spent in lecture halls, studios, and libraries. In order to help attain the desired rewards in our journeys to become top design professionals.
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