In Education We All Want to Be Nice: Lessons Learned from a Multidisciplinary Design Studio

Critical Analysis

Industrial design students are immersed in a “studio culture” that is unique, and when they work collaboratively across disciplines, this culture can be surprising to students from those other fields. In this text, Cennamo characterizes the most unique aspect of studio culture as one of a pursuit of idea refinement, which is fostered by a fearlessness, a desire for criticism, and a democratic perspective of idea ownership. The title of the text references how, in a different discipline—education—students may be asked to adopt a studio culture, but struggle with how the social norm of kindness is challenged during the span of a project. Cennamo presents evidence of this struggle in the form of a case study, with a multidisciplinary set of students pursuing the design of a museum experience.

Cennamo begins by describing the fundamentals of design process, which is conflated, perhaps purposefully, with studio, by explaining that “Although the students neither met as a class for the extended hours typical of many studio courses nor were provided with dedicated desk space available to them at all times, the pedagogy and epistemology of these courses was consistent with that of the industrial design studio.” Cennamo cites her own work with Brandt as a description of that pedagogy, and indicates that it includes the ability for students to generate a variety of solutions to a problem, to work in a diverse group, and to ensure an appropriate group climate.

It is the identification of this group climate and process that is most unique to Cennamo’s work. The climate, in the sense of studio pedagogy, means fostering trust, ensuring that team members feel that their ideas are considered, the pursuit of challenging tasks in an environment with high standards. The processes include criticality, comparison of ideas, intrinsic motivation, and beneficial competition.

In the project, industrial designers had established familiarity of the unique nature of the group climate and processes, but the education students had not. This resulted in bi-directional conflict. Both the author and the education students were surprised when the industrial designers received negative criticism after spending so much time producing something creative—and additional surprise when, following the critique, the “students simply resumed work reconceptualizing the project.” Criticism was not a formal event as much as an expected and desired way of working in a studio, and the industrial designers were equally surprised when engineering and education students tried to avoid that focused discussion. The designers viewed their ideas as flexible; one student explained that “the second I put something out there, it's not mine.” This likely would be a better title for the text, because it is one of the most fundamental parts of the studio pedagogy that is often missed by other disciplines. This is not group-think, but instead is a realization that ideas are free—the idea is not the element of value, but it is the craft and ability to make, with and through that idea, that is the benefit of a process of design.

This same form of freedom, albeit more in the sense of a community with established norms, is the observation that students in the focus group finished each other’s sentences as related to the design process, and specifically related to the war-room style of working. One student explained that towards the end of the project, “we never really left the meeting… it was just like this table in the studio.” A second student followed, “it was almost like a continual meeting with people kind of coming in and going out.” The thread of studio is in a continuity of experience over a long period of time, where work is done in meaningful but discontinuous chunks, and the free ownership of the work, along with the shared physical space, becomes the unifying thread.

The pedagogy of studio is not in the problem-solving approach that Cennamo leads with, or even in the emphasis that is placed on critique. Studio-centric teaching and learning (and doing) is in the relationship of the space to the emergent nature of creative ideation, and the shared nature and non-ownership of that emergence. In the end, Cennamo recognizes the nuanced difference of “a crit” and this emergent space of designing, by proposing that educators “can work to establish social norms that value generating and discarding ideas freely.”

Research Value

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

• Emphasizes the freedom of ideas, and the "sharedness" of ideas, as a part of being in a studio space
• Shifts emphasis of critique from the "big jury crit" evident in other studio research to something more ongoing and more fundamental to the culture
• Presents studio as the centerpiece for ongoing work, and shows that design work is not something that begins and ends; process is the thread over time, and studio is the space for that work