The Common First Year Studio in a Hot-desking Age: An Explorative Study on the Studio Environment and Learning

Critical Analysis

While studio-based education has typically assumed a dedicated, physical workspace is present for each student, increasing class sizes has created situations where students share a studio space—they have no dedicated area and cannot establish permanent territory or “ownership” over an area, nor can they leave work and other items in the space for any prolonged amount of time. This space use is similar to “hot desking” in corporations: “the utilization of space becomes temporary and the studio society becomes ‘nomadic.’”

This presents challenges to some of the common pedagogical elements of design education. In a studio, “extensive involvement with the environment” provides a way for students to learn the rules of working in a creative context. This includes the “new field of language and communication” of studio, which is part of a hidden curriculum of learning.

The relationship between space use and learning can be studied through the systematic observation method of behavioral mapping, which tracks behavior over space and time. This shows that, in a studio environment, the randomness of a open-plan or “hot desk” approach to learning “allows students to be exposed to different neighbours’ work and interact with more peers… the nomadic style of studio use increases the changes of encounter and interaction between students.”

This nomadic experience is at the expensive of territorial benefits, such as the development of personal identity through space ownership and chances for private learning. Growth in design skills come through conversation with and around artifacts, and “for beginner students, it is rather important to be surrounded by their best work, as the first year studio is a process of building the ‘toolkits’ or professional skills and languages, and their design confidence.” Without a dedicated studio workspace, there is no way for students to establish that time-based sense of progress.

Research Value

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

• Shows that non-dedicated space has some real benefit, such as interactions with a more diverse set of students
• Reinforces that, without dedicated space, newer students will struggle to establish a sense of creative self, identity, and confidence