Searching for Personal Territory in a Human-Computer Interaction Design Studio

Critical Analysis

In art and design education, studio as a differentiated way of working is most immediately obvious in its physical nature: it literally looks different than most classrooms. Rather than rows of seats, students sit at workshop-style desks, and those desks are typically “claimed”—the student has their own desk for the duration of a project or semester. During that time, they can use, customize, and alter their workspace with a great deal of freedom, and as a cohort, students establish a sense of shared territory and shared community through the ways they organize, claim, and overlap in the space.

Research from Demirbaş and Demirkan and Brandt show how the use of externalized sketching requires that dedicated physical space, and how students are encouraged to work in their studio space after hours in order to support a building of community. These are aspects of a larger “signature pedagogy” of studio teaching and learning. At the heart of this pedagogy is Shaffer’s interlocking cycle of expression and feedback, and Cennamo’s extension of this model as a perspective on how students shift to become practitioners.

This physical space is emulated by educators in other disciplines who are interested in bringing the whole of that larger studio pedagogy into their classrooms. Modell and Gray discuss one attempt of educators in a Human Computer Interaction program in providing a studio-like space for their students. This effort had a constraint challenge: there was not enough space for students to permanently claim a workspace, so the space was considered entirely shared.

The authors describe the idea of human territoriality, or “a feeling of ownership over physical or social entities in a workplace.” Personal space is dynamic. Territoriality is more lasting, and can help strengthen a sense of belonging in a social group, but also limits knowledge sharing. In a dedicated studio space, students mark their space by placing objects there permanently. In this case, there was no room for real territoriality.

The researchers gathered data related to this territoriality in a number of ways, including interviews with two faculty members, observation of students in the space, and interviews with students. They describe this as a “naturalistic case study,” where “the researchers observed behaviors in person in their natural environment.” One of the first findings of this case study was the misalignment between the design intent of the space and the actual usage of the space. The faculty envisioned the studio as a “very messy place” where students work in an ongoing fashion, much like a traditional design studio; the research, however, showed that neither of those things were happening. This may be because there was no dedicated storage for students, or because there were no encultured expectations set about the use of the space, and so it “defaulted” to being used as a traditional co-working style office. One faculty member indicated that the space had not been incorporated intentionally in the actual coursework. The space was clean and tidy and showed no real creative embodiment, and so it did not achieve the public and always-in-use style.

Classrooms and office spaces are ubiquitous, while studio spaces are not. We have learned how to “use” a classroom made up of of chairs in rows and an instructor in the front; we’ve also learned how to “use” an office meeting room, with chairs around a large conference table. Studio space use has not been taught, and it’s likely that students received neither formal or informal clues about how the studio-like space could be better made into a real studio environment.

It’s also plausible that a shared space simply can’t be made into a studio, as the territoriality, privacy and permanence is a fundamental part of the culture and larger signature pedagogy of studio working. The authors noted the common repetition of a desire by faculty and students to “make a space messy.” That messiness is both literal and metaphorical. There is room for a great deal more consideration on what the mess is when considered metaphorically, and how that idea of a working studio mess is private, public, shared or owned.

Research Value

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

• Identifies “territoriality” as a phenomenon of space use related to ownership, community, and knowledge sharing
• Describes a view of a “signature pedagogy”, although does not describe this in much depth
• Shows the challenges of changing existing student behavior: simply providing a space doesn’t mean students will use it, and even with best intentions, students may avoid using a space like a studio if they don’t see cultural and historic precedent that it can be used that way
• Presents whitespace related to the relationship between “being (metaphorically) messy” and “having territory”