Abstract
Attending to a university program, is one of the most crucial changes that may happen in the life of a young person. In architectural education this transitional period can be even more complicated than many of the other branches. That‟s the reason behind the fact that beginning design education is one of the issues which has been discussed the most amongst the educators involved in the field. There are many different methods of introductory design education existing all over the world. The variation in these approaches mostly depends on what is believed to be the fundamentals in design and architecture. Still many of the basic design courses are planned to teach the fundamentals of visual organization, shared by all fields working in the visual domain within a closed system and apart from real concerns of architectural design. Although learning compositional issues are important for students of architecture, it should be kept in mind that architectural design is a social activity and there are many extrinsic factors which affect the decisions of designer rather than the formal relationships. Thus, it is believed that this approach should be enhanced by providing students with an insight about the complexity of architectural design and factors which influence decisions about forms and the most important of all the existence of human being. The aim of this paper is to discuss a student-centered method of introductory design education developed in the Faculty of Architecture in Eastern Mediterranean University; which aims at achieving the mentioned goals, its structure, theoretical background and pedagogical considerations.
