I’m gaining clarity on what I am interested in most about design studio in higher education, and it’s starting to shape my next set of research; I want to understand what design students feel constitutes a positive or negative design studio culture, and how that culture manifests in a studio learning environment.
I’m not done with my faculty-focused research yet, but one of the things that is bubbling up to the top is the fragility of students. One professor told me “The students are broken” and I’ve heard versions of that in nearly all of the interviews I’ve done so far. The general gist of this is that between social media fear of being exposed, COVID isolation, an “everyone gets a prize” culture, the economics of attending college, a ubiquitous short-attention span from students (and probably faculty, too), and the historic pressures of a critique-oriented environment, design education is overwhelming to the point that some students simply can’t function in it, at least not in its current model.
I think I’m caught in the nostalgia that I’m seeing from my participants, and I just can’t imagine a world where design education doesn’t happen in a studio. I think future student-focused research will temper that nostalgia.