Creative practices in the design studio culture: collaboration and communication

Critical Analysis

In design studios, students learn to externalize their in-process work in a public manner. Material artifacts, like sketches and physical models, take on multiple roles. They are “coordinative artifacts,” in that they hold and transfer meaning; they “translate certain intangible work practices into more visible work information.” This has a collaborative benefit, in that the tangible and useful information is shared, and that collaboration is “critical to a design studio’s creativity.” Engestrom describes that creativity is not in one’s head, but instead is emergent in context. The studio is the backdrop of that context, and the “design studio culture” is a visually rich ecology, one that serves as organizational memory and provides for distributed cognition. Vyas et al describe the artifacts in the studio as one of the richest ways for engaging with the distributed and collaborative work. They indicate that “use of artefacts can be seen as externalization of thoughts, ideas, and concepts.”

These artifacts are presented in a space, and that space supports social activities. Studio space provides artful surfaces—surfaces that “designers create by externalizing their work-related activities, to be able to effectively support their everyday ways of working.” These surfaces don’t hold art; instead, they are artfully integrated into work process. They are used to orient design activities to a present moment, acting as planning tools, and are also user to visualize the history of decisions and progress. They are mediators and often act as delineators of decisions that have been made.

More importantly, these spaces act as a way to ensure that ideas don’t get “lost” in the mess of work, as design work is prolific and expansive. For some designers, “even a slight or unintended change can lead to problems in their design practices and in some cases one a design artifact is lost from the ‘sights’ of designers, it would eventually mean that the design artifact may never be retrieved again.” Artful surfaces provide other students and faculty the ability to “fly through” the work-in-progress and know what’s happening, quickly. They act as visual and externalized work lists and project plans, and allow a team to organize, manage, and reflect on their work together.

Research Value

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

• Introduces “artful surfaces” as a way of considering project process externalization, and as a part of work, not a part of displaying work
• Show how proximity acts as an externalized memory and as a view into the iterative history of a designerly way of knowing (and doing)
• Uses (but does not define) the phrase "design studio culture"