Importing Artistry: further lessons from the design studio

Critical Analysis

In this text, the author explores design studio pedagogy through a lens of exhibition, as it relates to artistry.

Exhibitions are often tied to formative assessment, and typically occur at the end of a quarter or semester. These may be celebratory, as compared to a demonstration of mastery, and they are “culminating performances.” In a strong pedagogical system, however, exhibition takes on a more educational role. Exhibition is generative, “meaning it comprises the entire system of performance and criticism.” It is a method of both showing and telling, and so it helps students to “construct increasingly sophisticated understandings and to exhibit those understandings through increasingly masterful designs.”

Exhibition can be a valuable metaphor, as well; it represents a sense of equal giving and taking between a teacher and a student—it is “between the ends and means of instruction.” It is not about finality, as finality (and summative exhibition) implies that no further reflection can occur, and further contemplation is not valuable.

A movement towards artistry is a feature or goal of exhibition. Common educational interactions in a studio show this movement occurring. A desk-crit, a “hallmark of the studio,” brings exhibition to life on a number of levels. A student exhibits their progressive understanding, grounded in an artifact. A professor helps the student work through the implications of a design decision, and shows how designers think about their working process. This is criticism, but is not assessment, and while critical, is not denigrative. “The tradition of ongoing and reciprocal performance punctuated by criticism is so central to the pedagogy of the design studio that it is not considered assessment at all. Rather, it is the essence of instruction.”

This form of desk-crit is generative. It is a performance, and “counts.” But because it is not summative, “the performance assumes a more spontaneous, improvisational character.”

The development of artistry is linked to exhibition. Considering design growth as an exhibition “makes visible a relationship between performance and assessment, which suggests a way of organizing instruction.” Exhibition is a valuable form of design pedagogy only when it is not actually summative at all; it calls for “teachers as well as students to perform, to critique, [and] to demonstrate mastery.”

Research Value

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

• Implicitly argues against final critique, or critique as assessment, and instead calls for the exhibition of criticism to happen continually
• Claims, definitively, that the performance/critique cycle is the essence of instruction.