Studio Through Studio: a diffractive reading of the educational design studio

Critical Analysis

In this article, the author examines design studio education through the lens of a studio in professional practice, primarily using the book Studio Studies to inform his understanding of a practitioner studio. A frame for further study is provided, with specific research questions that might be later addressed.

Research into educational design studios has generally focused on the interaction between a professor and a student, emphasizing the nature of a desk-crit, and positioning the instructors as the driving force for learning; the author notes that “the sheer volume suggests that researchers believe these interactions are critical to how students learn to design.” A much smaller set of researchers have investigated the social dimensions of learning, with “a shift from learning as an individual cognitive activity… towards a socially distributed activity.”

There is a third lens for exploring studio, which is one that examines the space of studio not as a container to hold either instructor focused or student focused activities, but instead as a socio-material setting that is mutually co-constituted. This perspective emphasizes that objects take as central a role as people (both are material), and these elements are entangled; studio is something we do, not somewhere we are.

The author indicates that Studio Studies proposes five main features of a professional studio; he then explores if these features are present in an educational studio, too.

Studios are presented as a place where things are made, as juxtaposed to a place where things are used or experienced. But an educational studio is “a site of creation and validation, and the validation comes in the form of assessment.” Professional studios have a material memory about work created by designers, while educational studios have a material memory that is “focused on exemplars rather than experiments and failures.” And this material memory acts in a professional environment as a “material manifest,” but an educational environment may not provide that material intimacy.

The biggest difference in a professional studio and an educational studio is how identity is presented. “While a professional studio could be said to maintain designers’ identifies through practice, the educational studio’s primary aim is to make disciplinary identities.” The author notes that this comparison between professional studios and educational studios raises a number of unresolved questions, and one is directly related to this identity development:

If, as discussed previously, we can frame the primary purpose of the design studio as about making identities, what would an approach that takes the concept of distributed creativity–that pays attention to routine, everyday, material processes–and applies this to researching how designerly identities are shaped and formed through studio education?

Research Value

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

• Confirms an over-emphasis on research into reflective practice, rather than into the other qualities of studio
• Argues a strange and unresolved distinction between the reflective practice perspective, a socially distributed perspective, and a socio-material perspective