Informal peer critique and the negotiation of habitus in a design studio

What I read

In this article, the author examines students' perspectives on design critique. He describes the way students describe the places where criticism is provided and the nature of the criticism they provide, and then looks at the process of student critique through a unique lens of Bourdieu's habitus.

The author begins by describing the role of critique in design education. Authors have viewed it from a number of perspectives; Katherine Cennamo describes it as a way to receive constant feedback, and Kathryn Anthony describes it as a "high stakes assessment tool." It has a number of ways of showing up—both formally and informally—and Brad Hokanson "synthesizes this wide range of critique as a form of distributed learning and evaluation, which occurs through social interaction and engagement in the design studio." These ideas, taken together, indicate that there is "little space for students to communicate through critique." This is the focus of the author's work: understanding informal critique that occurs outside of the classroom.

A model of habitus, made up of fields and doxa, is introduced. Bourdieu, a sociologist, described habitus as a way of "deconstructing the lived experience of a complex social and cultural environment like the design studio." Habitus is the conceptual social space surrounding fields—the spaces where norms are established—and doxa, the norms themselves.

The author describes his study. Four graduate students participated in a preliminary interview, a self-critique, a paired critique, and a review of their critique. This data was analyzed, and two main themes emerged: beliefs about critique, and the embedded structures of critique.

Beliefs about critique is described briefly: students described conducting critique in non-traditional places, and received critique from non-students.

Different structures that emerged are presented as pairs. The first is the comparison of a formal and informal critique. The space of the classroom was viewed as a delineation for a type of feedback; students then viewed their criticism through that lens, with one student seeing that legitimize criticism, while the other saw it as a forced or artificial way of receiving feedback. Another comparison is described, between objective (or "right") critique and subjective criticism. One student felt that it is impossible for someone (like a professor) to understand enough about a project to offer specific critique, and that generalized critique isn't valuable. Another noted that critique is about asking questions, in an effort to have students arrive at a conclusion on their own. The last comparison is about the professor as compared to the student. Some students excluded the professor entirely in order to "hide the messiness of their process from the professors so they could get critique on a finished product." Students viewed feedback from professors and other students differently, where critique from a professor was viewed as an assessment, but critique from students as a contribution or opportunity for help.

The author then returns to Bourdieu's habitus model, and examines the research data through this lens of an "interplay of personal agency, belief and action" and how these occur in the social construct of the studio. Helena Webster is cited as indicating the restrictive nature of studio pedagogy as resulting in "the production of a certain 'type' or 'personality' of designer." Some students were actually aware of this occurring, and one noticed this when asked to review a transcript of her critique.

What I learned and what I think

It's fascinating to me how students perceive the role of a professor as a judge, not an instructor. That's clearly drilled in most by the continuity of a teacher as a Person In Control, and reinforced by the formality of college. And I'm not sure it's all bad, because a professor really should have more of a patterned language to judge the quality of the student's progress, work, and creative attitude. But judge is pretty much inextricably tied to fear and that's probably not what most design professors are striving for. I wonder if it's even possible for any one instructor to change that view, if it really is so dialed in institutionally. It's certainly possible at a larger programmatic or school level, because the construct of the entire educational model can (on an extreme) even get rid of professors entirely. But if there's a single takeaway from a single professor about consciously shifting from judgement to some other form of criticism, I'm not sure it's really going to be successful.

What follows from that, though, is that students will turn to each other (just like in the text, although it was provoked by the study itself) to receive criticism, and students are (by the definition of being a student) not yet prepared to offer meaningful support. They can challenge things, and their challenge is probably right because they have established taste and, theoretically, critical thinking. But their suggestions for changes won't be grounded in the pattern language that a good professor should have established by being a practitioner (whoops…..), and suggestions for skill-based improvements will be more or less non-existent at lower levels.

It's also interesting to me that students would want to hide the mess from their instructor. That's never been the case for me, at SCAD, AC4D, or anywhere else, and I wonder if there's something in the water at the unique university that was studied. Students are learning that somewhere, or picking up on the fact that "finished" is better than "in progress," and I wonder what sort of forces lead to that. It might be how much celebration or focus is placed on final product as compared to process, and it might be critique itself—if a light is shined on the output as compared to the process.

The method here is interesting. Having a student review themselves doing something, via transcript or video, is a great way for them to learn; this happens all the time when they watch themselves present. I've never thought of that as a purposeful research method, with one protocol creating another. I also see the value of the questions around attitude, particularly related to how one thinks they hold themselves in an interaction with a professor, although a lot of the nuance is probably lost there between self-image and actual experience.

I'm not sure about the relationship of all of this, though, to the ideas of habitus, field and doxa, which are all, by definition, unstated. It's not to say they can't come to life through discussion, but I'm not confident that a student will, through brief introspection provoked by a study, offer very much around the "active, unconscious set of unformulated dispositions to act or to perceive," or the "unstated, unconscious norms and beliefs that are seen by the individual to be self-evident." It does seem that one student got close, by seeing their terrible "shit sandwich" approach to critique coming to life, but the construct of habitus itself was not really used in detail.

I'm not sure that something like studio critique needs an Aristotle-based foundational framework for analysis; there's probably much more simple and base ways of analyzing what is happening, and research in this area seems so sparse that a very easy but obvious framing feels more useful.