The Tiny House Movement, a growing trend of home-builders and companies building houses under 400 square feet, caught my attention as a strong generative topic for an Advanced Drawing and Design class of 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-graders. The topic seemed both aspirational from an ecological point of view and concrete from a design and engineering perspective. The range of teaching possibilities allowed for innovative and challenging curriculum design as students would be tasked with understanding and practicing basic architecture as well as considering related thought-provoking content. Students would discover the factors contributing to the movement, such as economic pressures and the appeal of the DIY (do-it-yourself) movement.
I organized the curriculum in four parts: designing a tiny house, learning from experts, researching a related subtopic, and doing collaborative work. These four parts were woven together throughout a semester in which students met for two 80-minute and one 50-minute class each week. For instance, students would work for three to four consecutive classes on designing their tiny house; then they would jump to a class on researching their subtopic or learning from an expert; and, finally, they would return to their designing. Once all the individual houses were designed, students would begin work on one of two projects: preparing for an all-school assembly or building a model tiny home. Afterward, I would reflect and ask students to give feedback to understand how this extended unit could be improved in the future.
Here’s what we did and how we did it.
Designing a Tiny House
Students got to explore the design process architects use by designing individual tiny houses. They actually experienced conceptual design, schematic design (SD), and design development (DD). Visiting architects exposed them to construction documentation (CD) and construction administration (CA) phases that were too complicated for our scope.
During the design process, students got to imagine their tiny house as an expression of “their story,” a backbone of concept design. They got to ask themselves what underlying ideas were going to drive their design. Some were drawn to location as an inspiration for their house’s look, while others were inspired by materials and artful expression. From a food truck home to a surf shack to a dynamic, expressive tiny home with unusual angles and materials, all students had to have some driving concept and story behind their design. And they had to describe it in their sketchbook.
For those struggling to grasp concept design, looking at pictures of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water house and several Zaha Hadid buildings for homework helped them understand how famous architects use ideas, points of view, and story to drive their projects.
During the schematic design (SD) phase, students learned how to rough out their layouts with bubble drawings and by using low-resolution balsa-wood models. Bubble drawings are loose sketches that assign general uses to areas within a design’s overall footprint. Students circled areas (visual “bubbles”) for entry, kitchen area, bathroom, bedroom or sleeping loft, and dining or office areas. This stage of the design process gets the ball rolling without the time-consuming aspects of actually laying down ideas on graph paper or with detail. Students began to understand how design flows from the general to the specific and how, in order to finalize a design, there is a great deal of roughing out ideas, seeking feedback, and revising. Then, working in pairs and asking for feedback, students saw how the assigned spaces (bubbles on the drawing) appeared to a classmate, got feedback, and problem-solved if the layout seemed awkward or not fully optimized.
On graph paper in ½ inch = 1 foot scale, students were responsible for creating an accurate floor plan and elevation drawing during the design development (DD) phase. Working in CAD (computer-aided design) was optional. Two students chose to design their tiny houses in Google’s free design software, SketchUp.
In order to envision tiny living, students walked around campus with tape measures, measuring offices and smaller spaces to get a sense of scale. They also thought about airplanes, boats, and other confined spaces to consider designing for efficiency. An article on what architects have learned from studying slums was also enlightening. In “Slums as a Model for Future Projects,” the author noted that slums may appear chaotic but have underlying structures that can be informative to architects.1
Learning from Experts
Hearing from architects, exhibit designers, engineers, and research specialists gave students insights into related fields. These experts provided concrete instruction on the design phases above, as well as ideas for how to think about arranging a model house to share with our community. Visiting engineers introduced students to sustainability design, permaculture, and geothermal systems. Permaculture was a new concept to me and to the students. We began to understand the term as meaning “conscious design that integrates ecology, geography, architecture, and appropriate technologies for sustainability.” Our on-site research specialist provided tips for subtopic inquiries, such as exploring Twitter and databases. Having these experts to round out instruction and give students a sense of connectivity to career paths was inspiring. Two exhibition design experts gave students more insight into how information can be thoughtfully and dynamically displayed to engage audiences.
Group Work
Collaboration is essential to all design fields and therefore needed to be a featured aspect of the curriculum. Students collaborated on two products, a group presentation for an all- school assembly and a prototype model of a tiny house for our school community to explore. These two products required students to work together sharing ideas, organizing and selecting content, and building. Two groups were created; the students got to select whether they would work with the assembly preparation group or the model tiny house group.
Assembly preparation required three iterations of slides and speaking points. Students would let their group peers know whether a slide was confusing or lacked aesthetic appeal; then students would revise and give the presentations again a few classes later, reassessing the flow of information, clarity, and time allotted to each presenter and topic. For instance, how much time should be designated for an overview of tiny living, how much time for each slide, and how many subtopics should be presented? Students broke the movement down to five talking points: size, self-reliance/DIY, economic factors, environmental benefits, and legal issues. Each talking point would be on one slide. The students selected homelessness, solar energy, and food trucks as the subtopics to cover in the assembly. (I maintained a guide-on-the-side position for all these decisions.) 
The group that chose to build the model tiny house began with lots of discussion and sketching. This process, like figuring out the assembly content, was iterative and involved the group in collaborating on initial concepts for the model and getting inspiration from our visiting exhibit designers. The designers posed the idea of using the model to showcase work from the class, like each student’s tiny house floor plan and subtopic research. They encouraged the students to be aspirational by posing questions for the school community, such as “What can you live without?”
But because of poor time management, by the time the students had agreed on a general design direction, we were faced with time constraints. As a result, we had to consider efficiencies like building in cardboard or scaling down the model. In the end, students were able to use our theater flats, taken down from a recent play, and reconfigure them into freestanding corners of a 13-foot-by-8-foot model tiny house. 
Tables were covered in brown paper and kitchen objects like a coffee pot and utensils were place on top. 
A chair and taped-off areas were arranged to represent a bathroom. 
A sleeping loft was indicated by blue tape; a closet was mocked up by hanging clothing from the lost-and-found. Another teacher volunteered to drill together the theater flats with the help of students. Students hung up their floor plans, displayed their low-resolution balsa-wood models and some of their subtopic research, and created an area for comments and feedback from the community. The model was up for 48 hours in our courtyard and had to be presented between long periods of rain.
Researching and Learning about a Related Topic
As a generative topic, the tiny house movement inspires inquiry and research, and I tasked students with exploring a related subtopic. Students needed to brainstorm possible topics before choosing one. We followed brainstorming tips, such as deferring judgment at first, going for quantity, encouraging wild ideas, allowing each person to speak, and letting the brainstorm be visual. Expected topics like environmentalism, economics, and solar energy were generated in addition to less obvious ones like food trucks, bioluminescence, and homelessness.
Students learned about their subtopic in order to hold confident conversations with me and with their peers. They had to write a three- to seven-page paper and present seven sources. They spent time exploring online tools like Twitter for research. Subtopic research varied, but generally students submitted five to eight pages with text and images and held three- to five-minute conversations with me. In the end, the group organizing the assembly curated the subtopics and selected three to be presented.
Outcomes and Lessons Learned
Overall, as a first iteration of this curriculum design, I am satisfied with our experience. The assembly went well, and many in our school community visited and enjoyed the tiny house model.
By diving deeply into ambitious curriculum design, I was able to learn a lot even while enduring a certain amount of chaos. Creating curriculum and content essentially from scratch, I felt that it was a mostly healthy chaos that occurs when people have to figure things out as they go. I am grateful for the rich local community from which we were able to draw our visiting experts and for the willingness of my students to jump into the semester, knowing this would be a first pass at a new curriculum. Half the students provided feedback that they would have preferred the curriculum to be arranged in the following order: design tiny house, research subtopic, learn from experts, do group work. The other half responded that they enjoyed the weaving of the components throughout the semester.
Students were also asked to rank the four components in terms of how valuable their learning was from each one. Half of the students chose researching their subtopic as their most valuable learning, while more than a third (36 percent) chose designing their tiny house. I was slightly surprised by this and wondered if the half that chose their subtopic as most valuable were simply more passionate and connected to their chosen topic.
While I am tempted to move on to a new generative topic next fall for a new class, I am going to resist the attraction of novelty and repeat the Tiny House Project. Certainly, I will be better equipped to structure the class with confidence and to push for even deeper connectivity to our world now that I have this first pass under my belt. Themes like global housing and sanitation conditions, building materials and the concept of permaculture were touched on superficially this year. I hope that I can deliver a more efficient and deeper curriculum next time around.
Notes
1. Anna Popova, “Slums as a Model for Future Projects,” Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, p. 4; online at https://d.docs.live.net/9ab1f1ca57923621/Documents/NAIS/Independent%20Teacher%2010.31.16/The%20Tiny%20Housefall2016final.docx_APresponses.docx.