Friendship, discourse and belonging in the studio: the experiences of ‘non-traditional' students in Design Higher Education

Critical Analysis

Design studio education is as much a place of community as a teaching pedagogy, and the notoriety of design education as hard and time consuming implies that students will spend a great deal of time experiencing each other in that communal space. While these students may lack shared interests outside of school, the subject of their education itself—design—can become all encompassing, and so these students find themselves pursuing a common goal. “Virtuous acts of friendship” become a fundamental part of that communal experience, and in this paper, the author argues that Aristotle’s lens of phronesis is a valuable way of exploring the way studio friendships emerge and influence the development of virtuosity in the context of creative learning.

Excerpts from narratives of two students are presented in brief. One set of excerpts details a student who developed friendship-style relationships, became pregnant (or as the author overly casualizes, “was a little wider around her middle,”) and then was concerned that if she were to take a year off from school, she might lose the relationship she had with other students. She “now felt she was part of the cohort.” A second student, attending class part-time, had difficulty managing the online learning system and felt that the instructor was communicating things in person that were not made available online. Both examples are used to describe the “horizontal discourse” that took place become students to “allow for friendships to grow,” and some tactical examples are provided (such as one student creating a study guide for another.) No additional analysis into that horizontal discourses is provided.

The author gives a brief amount of space to discussing a relationship between phronimos (the ability to exercise practical wisdom, or phronesis) and the French Philosopher Ricouer’s view of “good feeling towards others.” A sense of individuality requires a sense of social relation, and the author makes a leap from both Aristotle and Ricouer to state that

For Aristotle too, living a good life entailed acting well for and with others; friendship could be seen as an important aspect of this. Including others in education, for example, and being responsible for people who were not always like us entailed thinking with practical wisdom, whether one was a student, a teacher or a manager.

The author is unsuccessfully pulling a thread to stitch together many ideas. Aristotle presents an idea that experience can guide good judgement. Ricouer presents a life plan, where all actions are directed towards ideals and dreams. A student in design studio made several friends, and was worried about losing them. Another student felt overwhelmed by the time commitment of her program, did not have a strong experience with the online learning system she encountered, and considered dropping out. The author concludes that “design educators should facilitate and celebrate friendship and virtuous action within and outside the studio by feeding back how well students interact with others.”

This staccato presentation of concepts lacks coherence, while a depth of investigation into any one of these major ideas could provide meaningful value to researchers of studio culture. Most important to any exploration would be tying the evaluative mechanism (Aristotle, Ricouer, friendship, online learning, or non-traditional education) to the unique quality of the data gathered: data from a design studio. Being virtuous is likely different in a design studio than in any other educational context, but the author never asks why (or addresses what those unique elements might be.) Building friendships has a unique character when those friendships emerge around designed artifacts and in a creative context. How does creativity impact that peer relationship building and the creation of creative culture? Being excluded from instruction because of a reliance on mediating technology leads to different outcomes in a project-based environment, like a creative studio; how does that manifest, and how might it be resolved?

This text would benefit from the selection of a single, simple lens through which to view the rich data gathered in the design studio. The filter of friendship and belonging is sufficient; the tie to more base philosophy is unnecessary.

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Highlights the need for a community of support for students
• Shows an example of a student pro-actively making an artifact to help another student who is struggling
• Shows how ambiguous instruction can cause anxiety in students, and lead to potential attrition