A theoretical framework for the studio as a learning environment

Critical Analysis

In this article, the authors describe an ecological framework that looks at surface structures and pedagogical approaches to teaching in a studio context.

Studio courses encourage students to “work in the studio, rather than at home during off-hours.” This provides students with a way to learn from one-another. Iterations—creating another version of a design—are “only good so far as they function in terms of eliciting feedback from peers.” Their work is externalized, and that work acts as a public audit trail, visible to all other students. “What has been a very private process for the student is made public,” which leads to students gaining greater self-awareness of who they are as designers.

In supporting this form of studio engagement, surface structures, pedagogical activities, and epistemological understandings converge. Studio structures are the observable elements of the studio, such as the space and tools. Pedagogical activities are the things students do; epistemological understandings describe “the beliefs about the nature of design knowledge and how it is constructed.” These three elements make up a theoretical framework for understanding the design studio. This framework positions the studio in a variety of ways in support of gaining a professional, designerly identity.

One way to consider the studio is as a community in support of legitimate peripheral participation. Through their academic experience, students establish a shared set of skills and vocabulary that mirror what exists in professional practice. This helped to transition them from student to designer; over time, as “students took on increasingly more complex design problems, there was a palpable shift in the ways they positioned themselves as more knowledgeable and identifying as ‘designers’”.

A related way to consider the studio is as a “practice community,” one that “serves as a bridge between academic and professional communities.” This is an experience that is not yet part of gaining peripheral participation, but is also not a simple duplication of a real-world studio environment. In this context, faculty “broker” interactions between academic studio and post-academic studio, slowly “making explicit tacit rules of design practice for students.” These interactions are sometimes at odds with the cultural expectations and norms of academia itself; for example, students may be unwilling to show their work before it is complete, or to let an idea evolve (or to reject an idea entirely.)

The authors conclude that their framework shows how an educational design studio combines knowledge of design, environment, and social practice. The faculty must act as a bridge between the freedom of academia and the realities of professional practice; this is a “sheltered practice community.”

Research Value

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

• Provides a framework for considering a studio learning experience
• Affirms Lave's peripheral participation, and offers a related alternative (practice community)