The distant studio: a survey of design students’ experience with distance educational formats

Critical Analysis

In this text, the authors describe the results of a study that focused on student sentiment related to online vs in-person design education. The data gathered from the study (in the form of questionnaire results) indicates that design students prefer in-person formats, and the authors conclude that, if design courses move online, the entire fundamental structure of the courses needs to be reconsidered.

As a result of COVID, nearly all teaching and learning moved online. This was particularly challenging for vocational courses, as “vocational training depends on one-to-one tutorial teaching.” This, often presented as a personalized design crit, is considered the signature pedagogy of the studio. The studio is both “the space where students work alongside their colleagues and under the guidance of a teacher,” and “a unique educational format and a pedagogical idea of how the teaching/learning process of design should unfold.” Because crit occurs in that physical space between a student and a teacher, presence is required. Additionally, because the interactions are highly visual, studio depends on the ability for a student to make something and for the instructor to respond to what was made, often in real-time.

Studio-based education, then, “requires limited class sizes, enough space for student work, access outside scheduled classes, and constantly displaying the projects’ work in progress.” Working time is different than in other disciplines; “regular studio sessions tend to be long and open-ended; design projects can take weeks to complete, which means students work on their projects [at a unique pace.]” Additionally, a culture of studio emerges where students “wander the room, talk to each other, listen to music, and make the space their own.” Fundamentally, the studio (both the space and the teaching approach) is where students become designers—where they “gradually develop their personal designer identities by experiencing different types of oral communication.”

These traits are at odds with online learning. The authors describe that “there seems to be a built-in inconsistency between distance learning formats and the design studio.” This presents a unique distinction between design learning and other forms of learning, as research shows that distance learning is considered to be effective for basic knowledge dissemination. Richard Clark is cited as presenting a metaphor for online learning—that of a truck delivering knowledge to students—and the authors criticize that as “an extraordinarily reductionist view of education.”

Students note this inconsistency; the study results indicate that “students prefer synchronous in-person educational environments,” and as students grow into designers and learn what it means to design, this need for in-person presence increases.

Even as the safety need for online learning from COVID has disappeared, in-person studio learning is still challenged. The elements of studio, including “participant proximity, synchronicity… and the pedagogical value of working together on the same project” take space and time, and “administrative pressure to increase student enrolment while decreasing the number of teachers” is continually threatening the ability for studio-based teaching and learning to exist.

The authors summarize that if a design course were required to move entirely into a distance learning setting, it would need to be “predicated on different educational foundations… a new proposal of what a design course is and how it operates.”

Research Value

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

• Argues that the main elements of studio are dynamic time, large space, small class sizes, critique, and discussion
• Is one of a very small set of findings related to student sentiment of studio (maybe the only one?)
• Indicates that students prefer learning in-person (however, while the results are statistically significant, they are not as strong or overwhelming as one may believe from the discussion in the paper)
• Explicitly calls out the administrative pressures to do away with studio entirely