Climate in the Interior Design Studio: Implications for Design Education

Exploration

In this article, the author describes a survey-instrument based study with interior design students that explored their sentiment related to their education. The results indicated that students see their studio environment as more positive than as compared to a benchmark of a standard classroom.

In a studio environment, professors work individually with each student; this format is “atypical in comparison to more conventional classroom settings.” As a result, “camaraderie [between students] is curtailed to some degree by the fact that student achievement is based on the student’s independent performance and creativity.” This impacts the atmosphere of the studio, and that atmosphere in turn impacts the students and the experience they have.

Hill’s study shows that students in higher-level interior design studios “perceived their faculty to be more personally concerned about their success and their classrooms to be more cooperative, less hostile, suitably structured, and academically rigorous than did those students in more conventional university classrooms.”

Research Value

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

• Challenges the view of a studio as an abusive environment
• Provides data related to an established non-studio benchmark for emotions in the classroom

Another of these weird positivist studies...