Materialising the Studio. A systematic review of the role of the material space of the studio in Art, Design and Architecture Education

What I read

In this text, the author summarizes 38 articles on various aspects of the educational design studio approach to learning, and identifies six themes across the articles.

To begin, the author identifies that a design studio has a long history in design education, and has been a central part of learning for over 100 years. He indicates that a studio has several core features: “the specific use of material space, project-based learning, learning-by-doing and the requirement for students to experience physical, temporal and cultural immersion.” However, he notes that even though there is a perceived value in the studio, administrative realities of the university have begun to eliminate this as a resource. Space is at a premium, and as class sizes increase, it is less feasible to have dedicated workspace for each student.

He describes that there are negative perspectives on design studio, too. The space is presented as passive, and students need to understand how to use it; also, the space reproduces “practices which maintain persistent and unequal power relations.”

Next, the author explains his research questions, and the mechanics of the literature study to answer these questions. The main question to investigate is “what are the major discussions of material space in the literature on the art, design and architecture educational studio?” The methodology was to select content from two design journals, and to combine that with content from a database search across other journals. 552 articles were narrowed through a variety of mechanisms to 38; a large visual diagram indicates how the review occurred. Then, a thematic analysis was used to identify themes.

Six main ideas emerged.

• The design studio is a place to make things and “selves;” “the studio, through the ongoing act of making, renders the material dimension of learning visible.”
• Bridging occurs to connect academic experiences with professional ways of thinking and acting. Students are required to manage themselves and their group, and instructors are often practitioners themselves.
• The studio adds legitimacy to the things designers do in their jobs, such as hold critiques, although for some, “the studio is a space of ambiguity with few actual clues to expected behaviors. This ambiguity requires the studio to be “made coherent by the tutor.”
• Design studio enables different experiences and interactions. Student-to-student encounters are supported, and informal critique occurs.
• The studio acts as a space where learning occurs, both formally and informally.
• A design studio is disciplining, as it is a place where students learn to be designers. This includes a focus on the culture of design, as well as the development of disciplinary identifies.

The author then reiterates each theme, and notes there is “a near total lack of studies that directly researched tutors’ and students' experiences and use of the material space of the studio in (HE) art, design and architecture education.”

What I learned and what I think

Several weeks ago, I decided to make a concerted effort not to offer a negative opinion without a real and material critique, as its not productive and tends to spin me into a crappy mood. So as much as I seem to be gravitated towards that response here, I’ll leave it.

The themes that are presented are interesting, and as I haven’t yet done a comprehensive literature review of the ideas myself, I appreciate having at least one frame to look through. The lines between these themes is pretty fuzzy, and that may be a result of fuzzy divides in the raw material and indicate that it’s necessary to further delineate them, or that it’s a bad idea to try, given the richness of the environment itself.

In all of this, I continually wonder where the actual learning to do the design work happens—where are the skills introduced and practiced under the assumed artful guidance of a professor? Students essentially live in their studio space, but a professor floats in and out. If master/apprentice style learning is happening, it is pretty sparse, both as a percentage of time in the space and as a percentage of attention that can be focused on any one of 10 or 20 students. In a mid-level industrial design studio that’s focused on, say, human factors, when are the students learning… human factors, at least from a trusted source? For all of the discussion of the crappy power dynamic between the professor and the students, I think it may be overstated.I’m thinking about my studio teaching at SCAD. I taught in a classroom, not in their studio space. At CMU, they taught in the studio space. The best experiences for students, if being near a professor is considered a good experience (valuable? more educationally sound?), was when Bob or Mike or I we would come in weekends or at night, because that’s when our contributions could really be focused in the space where work was happening.

I’m building out a hypothesis here that maybe the emphasis on reflection-in-practice isn’t as important as we think it is in education, or at least isn’t as practiced, and that even master/apprentice learning isn’t really happening in any meaningful way. Impromptu peer-to-peer group grope is probably more likely what’s occuring, and that completely meshes with what I saw when I was a student. And as an aside, the only way this is happening in an online context is in a Discord channel, which is really separated from the space of the made artifacts.

If I let this play out and go to one of the author’s initial observations around administrative push for larger class sizes and no physical studio space, what’s lost is the nature of comparison (How does my thing look?), requirements or expectation checking (What were we supposed to do?), group-making outside of a specific group project, bitching about the professor,a view of progress as a whole (look at all of the stuff showing up on the wall), a want for ownership of ideas, and then a tear-down of that sense of ownership… it really is the social stuff.What’s the nuance on “social stuff?”

Back to the author’s themes, I think it is less of Bridging between academia and professional context, because it’s totally artificial and really not what happens in a professional studio at all, and less of Meaning, which was about the legitimacy of education happening in the space, because probably not a lot of it is really happening in a formal capacity either. The things for me to focus on are the other themes. Maybe.

I will say that I like this topic, and I’m pretty sure my next study will be in this space.