Creative Camaraderie: Promoting a Shared Design Culture for Staff and Students

Critical Analysis

Camaraderie emerges from extended and trusting collaboration. Design studios have typically been places where students build that camaraderie and shared interests and goals; this is in part due to the “cohort” nature of a traditional four-year degree. Students begin at the same time and work alongside each other, and faculty are equally represented in a lasting and consistent manner.

Due to budget constraints, course offerings that are customizable and modular, and the increased prevalence of part-time faculty, this cohort camaraderie is less likely to be a part of design education, and this results in increased attrition and decreased satisfaction. Loy and Ancher indicate that this develops a “lack of cohesive identity for the cohort.” Without a strong sense if identity, both students and faculty experience a lack of motivation, increased social isolation, and a lack of an "overtly expressed shared vision that all are committed to."

This shared vision should be developed collaboratively with student engagement, and should make it easy to see and understand a central focus of a course. The vision should be stated in a way that is overt, and should communicate the “ethos of the programme [and] its scope and intent.”

Research Value

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

• References the importance of a cohort that experiences studio in lock-step with one-another