Teaching Design to Students Who Are Afraid of Being Seen: Is Established Design Pedagogy Incompatible with Today’s Design Students?

Introduction

People who have pursued formal design education in a college or university setting likely experienced studio learning. Studio learning has many characteristics that are understood in scholarly texts as foundational to learning to design, and these characteristics have a long history.

In an effective implementation of studio, students often have their own workspaces (Corazzo & Gharib, 2021),Corazzo, J., & Gharib, L. (2021). Everyday Routines and Material Practices in the Design Studio: Why Informal Pedagogy Matters. Design and Technology Education: An International Journal, 26(4), 144-164. doi:10.24377/DTEIJ.article1171 their work is displayed on the walls (Fallman, 2007),Fallman, D. (2007). Supporting Studio Culture in Design Research. Proceedings of international association of societies of design research, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design. and studio spaces may have casual, more domestic areas such as lounges or kitchens (Thoring, Desmet, & Badke-Schaub, 2018).Thoring, K., Desmet, P., & Badke-Schaub, P. (2018). Creative Environments For Design Education And Practice: A Typology Of Creative Spaces. Design Studies, 56, 54-83. Professors rarely lecture (Orr & Shreeve, 2018),Orr, S., & Shreeve, A. (2018). Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education. New York: Routledge. and instead circulate among students (Hokanson, 2012),Hokanson, B. (2012). The Design Critique as a Model for Distributed Learning. In L. Moller, & J. B. Huett, The Next Generation of Distance Education (pp. 71-82). Boston: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-1785-9_5 have one-on-one or small group discussions (Goldschmidt, Hochman, & Dafni, 2010),Goldschmidt, G., Hochman, H., & Dafni, I. (2010). The Design Studio "Crit": Teacher-Student Communication. Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, 24, 285–302. doi:10.1017/S089006041000020X and prompt much of their teaching based on the artifacts that students make (Shaffer, 1997).Shaffer, D. W. (1997). Design, Collaboration and Computation: The Design Studio as a Model for Computer Supported Collaboration in Mathematics. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning, (pp. 249-255). Toronto. Work is project-based and so it occurs over an extended amount of time, and while deadlines and due dates are broadly synchronized, students are typically engaged at different parts of a project at any given time (Jones, 2022).Jones, D. (2022). Exploring Studio Proximities: Space, Time, Being. Proceedings of the Design Research Society. Bilbao. doi:10.21606/drs.2022.344 Work is critiqued in addition to being graded (Dannels, Housley Gaffney, & Norris Martin, 2008),Dannels, D. P., Housley Gaffney, A., & Norris Martin, K. (2008). Beyond Content, Deeper Than Delivery: What Critique Feedback Reveals About Communication Expectations in Design Education. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2, Article 12. doi:10.20429/ijsotl.2008.020212 and subjective feedback guides experiential learning (Williams, Ostwald, & Haugen, 2010).Williams, A., Ostwald, M., & Haugen, H. (2010). The Design Studio, Models of Creativity and the Education of Future Designers. Desire'10, (pp. 131-137). Aarhus. These qualities (along with others) support reflective practice (Schön 1983, Cross 1982, Cennamo & Brandt 2012).Schön, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.Cross, N. (1982). Designerly Ways of Knowing. Design Studies, 3(4), 221-227.Cennamo, K., & Brandt, C. (2012). The "Right Kind of Telling": Knowledge Building in The Academic Design Studio. Educational Technology Research and Development, 60, 839–858. doi:10.1007/s11423-012-9254-5

These qualities have a long, established historical precedent and have remained generally consistent over time. Phelan (1981)Phelan, A. (1981). The Bauhaus and Studio Art Education. Art Education, 34(5), 6-13. doi:10.2307/3192470 argues that "the basic influence on studio art education in this country in the last fifty years is derived primarily from a single source: the German institution called the Bauhaus." Subsequent descriptions of studio pedagogy across disciplines and across decades continue to emphasize the same instructional mechanisms—public making, critique, prolonged engagement, and visible risk—despite profound changes in social, technological, and institutional context. While these qualities may have been effective in the early 20th century, today's students have experienced materially different educational and social conditions than those for whom this pedagogy was originally created.

Students entering college have likely experienced a culture of standardized testing with objective, clear outcomes articulated for learning (National Education Association, 2020).National Education Association. (2020, June 25). History of Standardized Testing in the United States. Retrieved January 28, 2026. It's probable that they have experienced some or all of their K-12 education partially or entirely online, as they were physically isolated due to COVID for some of the formative years of their childhood. They are considered not only "digital natives" but also "social media natives" (Hollenbaugh, 2019),Hollenbaugh, E. E. (2019). Privacy Management Among Social Media Natives: An Exploratory Study of Facebook and Snapchat. Social Media + Society, 5(3). typically having a high degree of familiarity with digital devices and tools. When these students enter post-secondary schools, they are highly likely to be working full- or part-time while taking classes (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018),National Center for Education Statistics. (2018). Percentage of 16- to 64-year-old undergraduate students who were employed, by attendance status, hours worked per week, and selected characteristics: 2005, 2010, and 2017. Retrieved January 1, 2026. and may be taking care of children while simultaneously enrolled (Institute for Women's Policy Research, 2019).Institute for Women's Policy Research. (2019). Parents in College: By The Numbers. Institute for Women's Policy Research.

It's unclear what happens when today's students encounter a dated studio pedagogy. Do faculty feel current students are able to effectively learn when confronted with pedagogy developed in the 1930s? Do they see particular behaviors or responses from students as they encounter this unfamiliar way of learning? If instructors do see misalignment with established pedagogy and student experiences, what do they attribute this to, and what strategies do they feel are effective in better aligning teaching and learning strategies?

To understand this, we conducted a qualitative interview study with 25 design educators teaching studio-based courses across a range of design disciplines and institutional contexts in the United States. The results indicate that faculty see students as so emotionally unsophisticated that leveraging established design pedagogy is untenable. Today's students fear critique, being seen, and publicly committing to an opinion, and faculty describe how they can't engage in the core aspects of studio learning. The implications of this are that, while design studio pedagogy is grounded in principles that must sustain, the manifestation of these principles must change: the experience of studio must adapt.

The primary contribution of this work is in a) articulating faculty views on the challenges of engaging with design students in a modern academic studio environment, b) identifying an underlying threat to existing design pedagogy that is largely perceived by faculty as immutable, and c) proposing a framework for building new manifestations of old learning principles that can effectively support the emotional realities of modern students.

The established pedagogy of studio learning

In design education, studio learning describes both where and how design is taught and learned. In a studio learning environment, students are expected to make things, both to explore an idea and as a way to engage with an instructor. Responding to a student's work, an instructor "explores the implications of various design choices, suggesting alternative possibilities, or offering ways for the student to proceed in his or her exploration of the problem" (Shaffer, 1997, p. 252).Shaffer, D. W. (1997). Design, Collaboration and Computation: The Design Studio as a Model for Computer Supported Collaboration in Mathematics. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning, (pp. 249-255). Toronto. That instructor is rarely an expert in any particular problem or content of a student's project, and "when students embark on a project in response to a brief, they can find themselves in territory uncharted by the teacher… [this is] called 'reverse transmission' because the students appear to be transmitting the knowledge they have created to the lecturer rather than vice versa" (Orr & Shreeve, 2018, p. 117).Orr, S., & Shreeve, A. (2018). Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education. New York: Routledge. Instead, instructors are experts in the process of design—framing problems, managing ambiguity, applying various methods, and solving problems creatively (Rauth, Köppen, Jobst, & Meinel, 2010).Rauth, I., Köppen, E., Jobst, B., & Meinel, C. (2010). Design Thinking: An Educational Model towards Creative Confidence. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Design Creativity. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-31991-4_3 Learning happens through a conversation among the student, the artifact, other students, and the instructor, and the artifact becomes the medium through which knowledge is constructed; Fleming (Design Talk: Constructing The Object in Studio Conversations, 1998, p. 61)Fleming, D. (1998). Design Talk: Constructing The Object in Studio Conversations. Design Issues, 14(2), 41-62. explains that "while it is the students who present their ideas and artifacts in the conversations… it is the professor who responds to these presentations, endorsing, interrogating, and pushing the designs towards increased or decreased stability."

Thoring, et al. (Creative Environments For Design Education And Practice: A Typology Of Creative Spaces, 2018)Thoring, K., Desmet, P., & Badke-Schaub, P. (2018). Creative Environments For Design Education And Practice: A Typology Of Creative Spaces. Design Studies, 56, 54-83. identify several distinct spatial archetypes within studio education, including collaboration spaces that afford dialogue and shared work, making spaces that support hands-on experimentation, noise, and mess, and personal spaces that allow for focused work. This often occurs at a dedicated workspace more akin to an office desk than one that might be found in a lecture hall. An instructor often engages with students at their personal space, surrounded by what Vyas, et al. (2013, p. 429)Vyas, D., van der Veer, G., & Nijholt, A. (2013). Creative Practices in The Design Studio Culture: Collaboration And Communication. Cognition, Technology and Work, 15, 415-443. call artful surfaces—surfaces that students "create by externalizing their work-related activities, to be able to effectively support their everyday ways of working." These surfaces allow designers to visualize the history of their decisions, see current trajectories, and immerse themselves in a problem. They are used to orient design activities to a present moment, acting as planning tools, and they often serve as evidence of design choices that have already been made.

The wall itself becomes an instrument of communication. Dannels (Performing Tribal Rituals: A Genre Analysis Of "Crits" in Design Studios, 2005, p. 147)Dannels, D. P. (2005). Performing Tribal Rituals: A Genre Analysis Of "Crits" in Design Studios. Communication Education, 54, 136–160. doi:10.1080/03634520500213165 identifies two defining elements of studio teaching: the wall as a "commanding force" and the feedback that follows from audience engagement. The wall functions as a focusing surface upon which presentation, reflection, and critique occur. Students must "establish a connection between the wall, themselves, and the audience," highlighting the interplay between visual and verbal modes of expression. Faculty emphasize that students must "learn to become critical" and to "propel forward thinking about a design project" .

Some scholars feel that critique is not just an isolated practice; instead, it defines the entire educational experience, where "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" (Cossentino, 2002, p. 44)Cossentino, J. (2002). Importing Artistry: Further Lessons From The Design Studio. Reflective Practice, 3(1), 39-52. doi:10.1080/14623940220129861—it is the "active pedagogy of the studio" (Hokanson, 2012, p. 74)Hokanson, B. (2012). The Design Critique as a Model for Distributed Learning. In L. Moller, & J. B. Huett, The Next Generation of Distance Education (pp. 71-82). Boston: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-1785-9_5.

The qualities listed here are generally accepted as core to the pedagogy; not all, however, agree that the qualities are positive. Some research has shown that students report being "literally frozen with fear" during critique, unable to listen to others or absorb feedback on their own work (Blair, 2007, p. 89).Blair, B. (2007). At the end of a huge crit in the summer, it was crap I’d worked really hard but all she said was fine and I was gutted. Art Design & Communication in Higher Education, 5, 83–95. doi:10.1386/adch.5.2.83_1 Over time, they adopt strategies to cope with this discomfort, like over-preparing, agreeing without introspection, and projecting an artificial sense of confidence. Webster (2007)Webster, H. (2007). The analytics of power. Journal of Architectural Education, 60, 21–27. doi:10.1111/j.1531-314X.2007.00092.x notes that students adapt to this recurring structure by over-exerting themselves in preparation of a class event, listening passively to responses in a critique, and agreeing with things they don't necessarily understand. In describing her research, she argues that these coping mechanisms "clearly negated the possibilities of deep, transformative learning because they suppressed honest reflection, self-doubt, and any admission of not knowing or not understanding". She compares studio learning to Foucault's theories of micro-technologies of power, indicating that students view critique as terrorizing.

In summary, studio pedagogy demands students form and assert opinions, seek out criticism, present their work even when it's incomplete, and work publicly; design studio pedagogy requires that students are visible. In scholarly work, these practices are described with striking similarity over time, indicating that while disciplines, tools, and institutions have evolved, the main instructional forms of studio pedagogy have remained largely unchanged.

The changing context of being a (design) student

The principles described above have been used with remarkable consistency in design education, even as the conditions under which students learn have changed dramatically. Today's students have a relatively overt relationship with design in everyday life. Brands routinely highlight celebrity figures as designers, elevating the profession of design and bringing the ideas of aesthetics into popular culture; figures such as Kanye West or Rihanna are known not only for their musical artistry, but also for their consumer launches of things like shoes and clothing. In parallel, platforms such as Instagram and TikTok have normalized and simplified acts of making, editing, and publishing content, allowing students to participate as designers prior to any formal training. The language and norms of design, particularly within graphic and visual communication practices, have become widely accessible through popularized discussion of filters, cropping, gradients, and color correction. As a result, students often have familiarity with the surface language of design and authorship, but without experience in the forms of public critique, uncertainty, and sustained inquiry that studio pedagogy assumes.

Students entering college or university will not experience the traditional narrative of a four-year, linear and on-campus degree. The six-year graduation rate in the United States is approximately 61 percent (National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, 2025).National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. (2025). Yearly Progress and Completion. Retrieved January 1, 2026. Over half of full-time undergraduate students balance coursework with paid employment (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020),National Center for Education Statistics. (2020). The Condition of Education 2020: College Student Employment. some working across multiple jobs; 22% (or almost 4 million) undergraduate students are parents ,Conway, K. M., Wladis, C., & Hachey, A. C. (2021). Time, Poverty and Parenthood: Who Has Time for College? American Educational Research Association, 7. coordinating childcare with school. These pressures are compounded by the rising cost of higher education. Since the mid-1980s, tuition at both public and private nonprofit institutions has increased by roughly a factor of four Turner, S. (2018). The Evolution of the High Tuition, High Aid Debate. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 50(3-4), 142-148., which has changed the way students view their relationship with their school—many now see learning as transactional, with students being viewed as consumers or purchasers of education.

Students who enter college directly from high school were in early adolescence during the COVID-19 pandemic, and for many, long periods of online instruction in private contexts may have changed their expectations of in-person interactions with other people. Social media has been a major part of their entire lives; these platforms have been criticized as providing opportunities for aggressive bullying (Craig, et al., 2020)Craig, W., Boniel-Nissim, M., King, N., Boer, M., Donnelly, P. D., Harel-Fisch, Y., ... Bjerel. (2020). Social Media Use and Cyber-Bullying: A Cross-National Analysis of Young People in 42 Countries. Journal of Adolescent Health, 66(6), S100-S108. and associated with rising levels of anxiety and depression, particularly in young adults (Primack, et al., 2017).Primack, B. A., Shensa, A., Escobar-Viera, C. G., Barrett, E. L., Sidani, J. E., Colditz, J. B., & James, A. E. (2017). Use of Multiple Social Media Platforms and Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety: A Nationally-representative Study Among U.S. Young Adults. Computers in Human Behavior, 69(April), 1-9. Popular accounts have labeled this generation as the "Anxious Generation" (Haidt, 2024),Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York: Penguin. advancing causal claims between anxiety and smartphones. These accounts have been critiqued in popular media as being oversimplified, as students have also found themselves in a confusing world of institutional instability (Warner, 2024).Warner, J. (2024, March 22). The Kids Aren't All Right. Are Phones Really to Blame? Retrieved February 6, 2026 from The Washington Post.

In summary, students entering college directly out of high school today are familiar with discussing and making designerly artifacts, largely on social media; these same social media channels have been blamed for shining a constant, critical spotlight on students and being correlated with feelings of anxiety and depression. These students have experienced unprecedented use of online learning tools, due in large part to the global pandemic, and their use of these tools in that context was isolating. They are likely to be working or taking care of children when they enter college, and statistically, they have a high likelihood of leaving college without attaining a credential.

How does studio pedagogy function in the new context of higher education?

Taken together, these concepts illustrate that a very different student population is entering into design education than those in previous generations.

One might think that, based on their formative experiences with social media and popularized tools for design and self-expression, students would come to studio already prepared to engage in working publicly, making things and receiving criticism, and working iteratively; if this were the case, it seems natural that more time can be spent learning to hone craft and to engage in higher-level thinking of design, such as design strategy. But if the other qualities reported in modern generations of students have had meaningful negative impact on their expectations of studio learning—and if these qualities have equally negative impact on their actual ability to learn to design—design studio pedagogy may have questionable efficacy.

It is unclear how instructors have perceived these changes. If they see harmony between today's students and yesterday's pedagogy, or if they see meaningful conflict between established learning structures and today's students, what, if any, strategies do they feel they have used to address them successfully?

To understand and inform these questions, we engaged with design instructors who teach in a studio context. Through comprehensive interviews with 25 design instructors, in fields ranging from industrial design to graphic design to interaction design and UX, we investigated the relationship between the recognized best practices in teaching design and the modern design student. We anticipated hearing descriptions of a largely unchanged studio environment and studio practice, and that was partially true. But what has changed, dramatically, is how faculty perceive students' abilities to engage in that practice; faculty uniformly present a picture of a student body that is emotionally at odds with what they, and existing literature, claim as the fundamental pedagogy of design studio.

Study design

Semi-structured, 1:1 interviews were conducted via Zoom with 25 design instructors. An interview protocol was used to guide the interviews. This protocol contained questions related to three primary topics. The first topic inquired into an instructor's experiences teaching in a design studio environment. The second focused on the elements of a studio that the instructor feels are most fundamental to studio pedagogy. The third topic investigated the elements that, in the participant's opinion, constitute a design studio culture. In each interview, the interviewer introduced themselves and described the purpose of the research, and gained the participant's informed consent, including permission to record the interview. All interviews were conducted in November and December, 2025. Each interview was recorded, auto-transcribed by Zoom, and then manually corrected for any transcription errors. The interviews ranged in length from 60 minutes to 90 minutes.

Ethics and Data Collection

The interview study was approved by the researcher's institution's Institutional Review Board and included gaining verbal informed consent from each study participant. The recorded interviews and transcripts were stored on a secure university drive with access restricted to the researcher. Personally identifiable information was removed from the transcripts, and participants were given pseudonyms, which are used throughout the remainder of this text.

Participants

Participants were selected who (i) were currently teaching an in-person design studio course in a form-giving design field (such as industrial design, graphic design, user experience design, or similar fields), (ii) were teaching at an associate, vocational (non-degree-seeking), undergraduate or graduate level, (iii) were teaching in the United States, and (iv) speak English.

Data Analysis

A hybrid analytic approach was used to analyze and synthesize the research material, combining reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2012)Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2012). Thematic Analysis. In H. Cooper, P. M. Camic, D. L. Long, D. Rindskopf, K. J. Sher, & A. T. Panter (Eds.), APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology, Vol 2: Research Designs: Quantitative, Qualitative, Neuropsychological, and Biological (pp. 57-71). Washington: American Psychological Association. with a theoretical commitment to discourse analysis (Gee, 2014).Gee, J. P. (2014). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (4th ed.). Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315819679

Categories of utterances were developed in a bottom-up fashion through visual mapping of similar utterances across interviews. These categories were framed as action-oriented statements from the perspective of an instructor (such as "Learning in a physical studio leads to more intimate learning with an instructor.") These statements were then grouped into broader insight themes—interpreted as patterns in how instructors perceive studio to function as a pedagogical whole.

Concurrently, individual transcript segments associated with each developing theme were re-analyzed using Gee's Building Tasks of Language, such as Significance ("What is being made more or less important, and how?") and Practices ("What activities are being highlighted, and why is the speaker indicating that the activity is valuable?") and structured into short narratives. This analysis was captured through individual written interpretative discourses, which identified how participants construct meanings about their experiences in studio, view and evaluate studio-based learning as a pedagogy, and think about their own roles in classroom interactions with students.

A narrative of findings combined these insights with supporting quotes, demonstrating both what was said and what saying it accomplished. These findings were then compared to the study's original research questions and used to critically reflect on the assumptions made about studio-based teaching and learning.

Findings: seven contradictions in design studio education

This research highlights seven contradictions between traditional studio education fundamentals and the wants, needs, and desires of today's design students, which are described below.

Studio requires sharing things that are incomplete. Students only want to share things if they are perfect.

Studio pedagogy depends on the routine exposure of unfinished work, but faculty describe how students struggle with this exposure. Raul teaches design strategy, and feels that students have been conditioned by social media to share only perfect, complete artifacts with the world, perhaps because of a threat of ridicule or embarrassment on platforms that encourage peer judgement. But if students avoid publicly making things in a studio environment, they miss the ability to talk as a group about what's happened, as it happens.

Norman, a veteran instructor of over twenty-five years, views the problem as one of creative confidence. He explains that "they're often feeling they may never have another idea, and especially another good one… when they have an idea, it's precious, because they're not used to having an idea at all." He blames an institutionalized dialogue, where students have been told "since third grade, they either do or don't have good ideas, or should or shouldn't have ideas." A critique of what they perceive as such a rare event can be catastrophizing for confidence.

While students fear sharing incomplete or unfinished ideas, faculty describe this exposure as valuable for learning. Frank, teaching design at a liberal arts college, describes studio as "a culture of sharing your work before you necessarily feel ready, and receiving feedback and critique," whether through "pinning stuff up," "walk-arounds," or "sharing stuff with other teams." Alex, teaching graphic design for over 15 years, notes that students actively manage who sees their incomplete work, explaining that while some students won't show incomplete work to anyone, "there are probably others who are like, I don't want my professor to see this, it's not ready, but I'll show it to my peers, to know that they're not the one grading me."

Studio requires taking risks. Students have learned to play it safe.

Studio pedagogy presumes a willingness to take risks in public, but many students have internalized that one succeeds by taking a safe, uncontentious pathway and just following the rules. Frank views these individual anxieties within a broader educational system that systematically rewards cautious rule-following, and for some students, he notes that the stakes are extremely high because they are on scholarships or visas that require a certain level of performance.

Alex describes the emotional cost of making things when outcomes are uncertain, describing how studio work often produces "a whole spectrum of emotional responses," even, as he explains, "occasionally, sorrow. Like, you know, something breaks, something didn't work out the way that. I was really planning on it, I'm frustrated, or maybe even sad." These emotions surface because making introduces exposure. There is, he further explains, "a gap between this idea you have in your head and what you actually end up, what ends up taking form." This is a gap of craft, but it can only be exposed and then considered by taking the risk of making the idea visible.

Jeff, an Associate Professor of Practice of Design at a large public university, sees this exposure as central to what it means to design. "I identify [risk-taking] as being designerly," he says, because "it takes guts to put that thing out there." He continues that this is especially true "when it doesn't work, and it's not gonna, you know, but some little piece does." Studio asks students to tolerate failure that is visible and unfinished. For students accustomed to correct answers, this feels fundamentally challenging and disorienting.

Faculty recognize that risk taking requires permission that students no longer assume they have. Darryl, running a program at a private university, recalls that students arrive "seeking permission to play, almost," and that he felt he had to "model that and push that in." For play and experimentation to occur, students must believe that they aren't going to get "punished—either scholastically or socially—for playing." Risk is only possible when students believe the system will not penalize them for it.

Alycia, teaching at an art and design school, connects this fear of punishment to perfectionism and the formulation of a designerly identity. Students feel that "I will only be a designer if I can be that." Risk seems existential; anything short of excellence questions if a student can claim participation in the design community. This is compounded by the social nature of studio, where students "very embarrassed or anxious. They're afraid to ask questions, or they don't want to do a pinup." In response, she deliberately creates space "for the process, and not just you show up for your presentation," countering students' desire to reveal only complete designs.

Studio requires giving and receiving criticism. Students struggle to do either.

Studio pedagogy depends on practices of giving and receiving criticism, but many students arrive without the skills, language, or disposition to do either. Aaron, a Professor of Product Design for over 25 years, observes that criticality has been systematically eroded in American schools, and sees this impacting not only how students behave in a crit, but how they develop a broad skill of criticality.

But both Tim (teaching at a public university) and Ernest (teaching at an Ivy) see students as thirsty for some sort of critical experience, even if they have no experience in how to engage in it. Tim describes how, after sharing reflections with students about their work, "they're just like, 'that was the most terrifying thing, but it turned out to be okay,' you know? I think there's such a yearning for that, but there aren't a lot of structures for it." When Ernest manages to structure critique effectively, he sees that students are "forgetting of the troubles of the world for at least a moment, because you're just so engrossed in the project, and the work, and the giving of the feedback, or the receiving of the feedback, or working through something, and so… if nothing else, I think studio is a great immersive distraction from the chaos of the world outside the studio."

Over her 25 years of teaching industrial design, Val has seen technology increasingly limit students' abilities to offer nuanced criticism of their own work, too. "This newer generation, they don't have to figure things out, they have a machine figuring things out for them, and it makes for a lack of desire to explore, being able to critically think about stuff, and creatively think about stuff, and it's really showing… they're so happy too early, right? So it's like, 'I have a solution, I'm done.' I'm like, 'No, you're just starting. Now you have this idea, now let's work with it. Detail it out.'… But that's not happening."

Studio critique fails because students have not learned how to think about judgment or how to separate themselves from the things they make. Studio requires critique as a collective practice of sensemaking and growth. Students arrive struggling to articulate preferences and are anxious about being evaluated, and are unwilling to be critical of their own work in a productive, rather than self-deprecating, way.

Studio requires being public. Students have learned to hide.

Studio pedagogy requires sustained public presence, but students arrive having learned that success depends on staying invisible. Alex sees this as part of a larger cultural story, attributing much of it to generational experience with social media and online learning.

Faculty consistently describe student resistance to public work as rooted in fear, embarrassment, and avoidance. Alycia runs and teaches at a program in interaction design, and explains that "there's a… problem with perfectionism, our students are very embarrassed or anxious. They're afraid to ask questions, or they don't want to do a pinup, for example." The pinup, a canonical studio practice where work is placed on the wall and discussed openly, becomes a key point for this discomfort, as the activity is entirely about exposure and collaborative discussion.

Faculty insist, however, that public making is foundational to studio learning. Allen, a Professor at a leading research university, describes studio as an environment where "you feel that you are public, right? Like, you are in a scene, you feel your own presence, you feel the presence of others, you know, there's no way for you to hide." He contrasts this with professional habits he actively discourages, telling students, "'don't go into your internship and sit there in front of your computer with your headphones on and just, like, produce.'" Frank echoes this sentiment, emphasizing that "in a studio, there's nowhere to hide. You're open about what you're working on and where your ideas are," and that adjusting from "hiding behind my laptop screen" to having work be "visible" takes time but is ultimately productive.

In smaller programs, visibility is unavoidable. Cindy has taught as an adjunct at an art and design school, and explains that "this program, such few students, your name is attached to everything, and everyone knows who you are. You can't skirt away and hide away by not saying anything." Alycia enforces this, telling students, "you have to be there, you can't have AirPods in, and watch TV. You can't hide, okay?" When students attempt to retreat physically, she intervenes: "one person would commandeer it and be sitting alone eating. I was like, you can't eat alone in a little room. These are social rooms."

Publicness in studio is not limited to speaking or presenting. It also involves listening in. Ernest reflects that shared auditory space is so central that its absence signals failure: "I wonder if there's such a thing as an anti-ingredient… I feel like if we were trying to set up a studio culture and a bunch of people in that space chose to put on noise-canceling headphones, that would be a flag for me. I'm like, 'something here is not working.'" Allen similarly emphasizes that "just working in the presence of others is… a key thing, I think, that the studio cultivates," because "everything is on display then."

Externalization reinforces this public learning. In her 25 years of teaching, Krissy has learned that leaving work visible over time allows students to see their own growth: "you can begin to kind of peel things away… What they see in that layering is how much they've actually learned." Students move from "I can't even believe I put that up there" to "oh my god, we actually have something." Jim, teaching adjunct in a fashion program, adds that pinned work supports different cognitive styles, allowing students to "linger longer when everyone has left" and still participate meaningfully in collective discussion.

Despite these benefits, faculty observe persistent social withdrawal. Jim characterizes student-to-student interaction as "really shy and reticent. It's like a middle school dance." Cindy notes that students feel they must "have the right answer before I can speak," which she calls "the antithesis of… what design research is." Theo, with close to 10 years of teaching, attributes this to deeper instability, stating that "the youth are broken," and describing "risk aversion" and "a delicateness" that requires him to be "soft around them often." Alycia sees the same pattern manifest as avoidance of commitment to a perspective or opinion, even in the design work itself: "They don't want to take a stance. They never want to commit to who they're designing for." In her reading, "they have survived and been successful up until now by just blending in. Not rocking the boat, just going along for the ride."

Studio demands that students be seen, heard, and overheard. Many students, shaped by educational systems, social media, and pandemic isolation, have learned instead to hide behind screens, polish in private, and avoid attention.

Studio requires being engaged. Students present passivity.

Studio pedagogy assumes active engagement. Students are expected to show up, participate, respond to one another, and take responsibility for sustaining a learning culture. Darla describes a mismatch between this expectation and students' prior conditioning, which has trained them to wait, comply, and react. She's concerned that this will impact their abilities to enter leadership roles when they graduate, because they won't take initiative in social situations. She describes how "they're not learning to flex to other people's language and styles. I was brought up, if I was gonna go talk to the CFO, that I was gonna talk to the CFO in CFO speak. Not design-speak, with empathy and ethnography, like, he could care less about that, right? My concern is that they're not learning to cross, to have conversations across generations."

Tim describes engagement as something that often has to be externally activated. He notes that students "love it when they're kind of nudged to do it," but that this engagement rarely carries beyond the boundaries of a single class. Efforts to build community through "events like Alumni Day" or public lectures routinely fall flat. He explains, "getting a vibrant culture, getting people to show up for a lecture is just hard."

Raul tracks this passivity to students' familiarity with online interaction at the expense of analog communication. He observes that students are "used to putting things online, and then lots of people giving them thumbs up, or not." When feedback is absent, there is simply "empty space." There is not, as he describes it, "that rigorous… A few people really going deep into your work." When Raul presses students to elaborate, even gently, he encounters resistance. "Someone says something," and when he follows up with "hey, what do you mean by that? Can you go deeper?" the response is consistent: "it's always, like, resistance to, like, get deep quickly." Students respond, but they do not engage.

Chad, having taught industrial design for over 25 years, attributes this passivity to the pressures students have increasingly felt around failure. Teaching at "one of the most expensive institutions for this kind of work in the country," he sees students who have excelled at every prior challenge by following rules. Admissions are increasingly competitive, and students arrive with "higher SAT scores" and long records of academic success. In Chad's view, this success produces an unintended outcome: "they have been trained to be averse to learning." Learning, in the studio sense, requires uncertainty and ambiguity. These students have been rewarded for certainty and control.

Other faculty describe engagement as something that develops slowly, only after safety and trust are established. Bailey notes that early in the semester, students are "afraid to ask questions," and when they do respond, their answers are "surface level," often "the answers… that they think I want to hear." Over time, this changes. Students become "more willing to ask questions in front of the class," and their debriefs grow "a little bit more thoughtful," eventually "bringing in their own perspectives."

Studio requires doing things for a long period of time. Students can't operate for very long.

Studio pedagogy presumes sustained, collaborative engagement over long periods of time. Chad observes that students simply can't make that work, given the complexities of their lives. He sees this as a positive emotional change, but one with negative academic consequences, as the studio becomes an empty space.

Even if students can fit long blocks of time into their schedules, faculty describe how they are unable to focus and be productive and self-directed over such an extended duration. Krissy describes the strain this creates, explaining that "we don't have enough time," while simultaneously calling the traditional format untenable. The six-hour studio block, she says, "is a killer," adding that "this generation, they don't have the attention span to actually sit there for that amount of time, so there's a lot of wasted time."

In response, Krissy describes restructuring studio work into short, tightly managed intervals. In the first year, she relies on "these 20, 25-minute sort of sprints," followed by deliberate pauses, because she knows "there's gonna be chatter, they're gonna pick up their phones, they're gonna start… drifting, they're gonna get a coffee, they're gonna come back." Focus must be repeatedly restarted. The instructor acts like a timekeeper, "kind of monitoring this," rather than assuming students can self-regulate. Krissy is clear that this scaffolding is necessary early on, because "you couldn't leave them there for 3 hours, because they wouldn't do anything. It would be a party."

Krissy contrasts this with later studios, where time is looser and some students have learned to manage their time, but she remains unconvinced whether the inherited model works. "I don't think the way that we're presently doing it," she concludes, "that that six-hours is a good use of anyone's time."

Rebecca, an Assistant Professor of Practice, similarly views long studio sessions as problematic. She describes the class as "intense," with "a lot going on," and explains that teaching long sessions requires constant attentiveness to mood, pacing, and stamina. "You need to be very observant of the overall energy of the class," she says, noting that she always plans breaks and adjusts activities based on how students are doing. She describes starting class with "a creative exercise," sometimes "the 30 circles," sometimes mindfulness, and sometimes explicitly releasing pressure by telling students, "you have 10 minutes to vent. Just complain."

Bailey echoes this struggle, uncertain about whether students can operate effectively for extended periods at all. Of her two-and-a-half-hour Friday class, she says, "they struggle with the time. It's long," necessitating breaks "so that they can… just not…," trailing off as if the fatigue itself is self-evident.

Studio assessment is subjective. Students expect objectivity.

Creativity assessment is inherently subjective, yet many students arrive expecting clarity and consistency; they have learned that grades should be fair, and therefore, objective: the criteria for being assessed should be clear. As Allen continues, he explains that part of his role is "almost like an unschooling, because in school, they don't really learn this. Most schools, or conventional school mindset that you think about, everything is so performance-oriented. It doesn't set up serendipity, and it doesn't build individuals, I feel. It builds some form of average. And in design, we always want this person that can push, in a constructive way."

Faculty describe this mismatch as a persistent source of confusion, anxiety, and resistance.

Bailey describes how her students "want to be told what to do, they want to be told how to do it, and what I want from them." They look for "step-by-step instructions," hoping for a linear sequence that guarantees success. When that structure is absent, they become unhappy. Bailey believes, strongly, that studio does not work this way. "This class is gonna be different than your other classes," she tells them. "I'm not gonna stand up here and talk at you… you're gonna jump in, and you're gonna do the work, and then we're gonna see what you learn from it, or what happens."

Faculty repeatedly blame students' expectations of objectivity on their prior educational experiences. Frank explains that from "kindergarten forward," students are trained to "sit still and listen hard and take good notes, to do well," while creativity "gets squeezed out." Bailey echoes this, observing that K–12 education emphasizes standards and testing, leaving "less room for exploration, or trying a different way of doing something to get to the same goal." Over time, students become skilled at following the rules. They learn how to succeed within objective systems, but not how to navigate subjective ones.

Rebecca sees the consequences of this conditioning in students' early behavior. At the beginning of studio, she notes, students are "very… shy? Or afraid? to… to say or do the wrong thing." They are accustomed to asking permission, uncertain about boundaries, and hesitant to act without explicit approval. This hesitation is compounded by broader life transitions. As Rebecca puts it, during the first month, students are managing "so many changes," from living independently to basic logistics, while also being asked to engage in "this crazy" form of learning that resists clear rules.

Other faculty see college turning into a transactional experience, leading to further expectations of objectivity. Alycia describes students treating education transactionally, saying it "feels like I have become an ATM, and they're just pressing… They don't understand that, the process matters," she explains. Students are "obsessed about what goes in their portfolio," and if a class does not produce a discrete artifact, they conclude "this class wasn't worth it."

But faculty insist that subjectivity is not a flaw of studio assessment, but its core way of examining artifacts that are made and progress towards being a functioning designer. Krissy emphasizes that studio learning involves negotiation; students learn "how to negotiate time," "how to negotiate space," and how to coexist with others whose behaviors affect their work. Ernest adds that students initially show "a shyness about asking for help" and "a stinginess about giving help" because they have been "indoctrinated into… educational systems that prize only individual achievement." Exposure to subjective assessment disrupts this individualism.

Across these accounts, students' desire for objectivity reflects a reasonable expectation shaped by prior schooling and economic pressure, but one that is at odds with the new learning environment they have found themselves in. Faculty ask students to tolerate uncertainty, to infer values through critique and comparison, and to accept that quality is judged relationally. For many students, this is disorienting. They are encountering, often for the first time, an educational system where judgment cannot be reduced to rules, and where learning emerges through negotiating ambiguity.

A framework of pedagogical translation to meet the needs of today's design students

It is tempting, even in the face of evidence, to hold on to familiar understandings of studio education. Many educators, the author included, struggle to imagine design education without its fundamentals: public pin-ups, critique, visible risk-taking, and long studio classes. But for students operating under heightened evaluative pressure, debt, a fear of being seen, and uncertain professional futures, these same methods no longer function as intended. Their reluctance to work in public, or to be incomplete, or to take risks is, in the context of their life experiences, a rational way of approaching design studio. The students are unlikely to change to fit the old ways of teaching and learning.

The seven contradictions have articulated this conflict. From a faculty perspective, each contradiction appears as a failure of method: students do not share incomplete work, avoid risk, and disengage from critique. But the contradictions reveal a jump between pedagogical intent and instructional method. The framework below makes that jump visible, distinguishing the goals of learning from the methods of teaching.

This framework identifies that the pedagogical fundamentals that show up in today's studio do not need to disappear in tomorrow's; they need to take new forms. The final column of this framework is intentionally non-prescriptive. Rather than proposing specific techniques, assignments, or classroom formats, it articulates the conditions that must be met for studio pedagogy to function as intended under contemporary circumstances. These describe pedagogical success criteria, not solutions. Multiple instructional approaches will satisfy these criteria, and the appropriateness of any particular method will depend on institutional context, cohort composition, class size, and disciplinary focus. The framework is offered as a translational tool: a way for educators to think about how learning aims might be achieved without relying on inherited studio rituals that faculty feel may no longer reliably produce their intended outcomes.

Discussion

Design education should be about helping students realize the value of creativity. When people learn to make things, they come to understand that the world around them is, at least partially, in their control. When ideas take form, they become something from nothing, and that something holds as much power as a name: it delineates a point of view, a perspective, and articulates this, not that. What's more, learning to make things is a step on the way towards developing a critical point of view about things. In an environment where artifacts are allowed to be incomplete, opinions about the world are also permitted to be unfinished. In studio, students are trying on designerly costumes of who they are and roles they can play, and by making sketches and models and diagrams and having these things critiqued, students try on perspectives of the world they want to live in and help build.

For this pedagogy to come to life, faculty require students to be brave, to take risks, to assert an opinion, and to be exposed. But there is a consensus amongst faculty that today's design students are emotionally unequipped to do these things even at the most rudimentary level. Alycia asks,

Alycia feels she has effectively become a therapist, not a teacher. She points out the negative professional implications of her students' fear of being seen: employers are likely looking for designers who can assert opinions, and support them with reasonable, and visual, arguments. But it's easy to forget, in the conversation of any given design discipline, that what is actually at stake during this formative point of education is not simply the ability to do the job of a designer. Students in industrial design are learning to design cars and bottles and chairs, but more importantly, they are learning to offer opinions on the types of objects they think the world should consist of. Fashion designers are learning to engage with fashion as an industry and a discipline, but are also beginning to offer opinions on what fashion means in the world. Design is a form of rhetoric, artifacts are arguments, and students are gaining the voice to make that argument. What's more, through discussion and critique, their opinions and gestures to a potential different world are being taken seriously, perhaps for the first time in their lives. Artifacts, they learn, hold power as they encapsulate an agenda. Criticism and opinion becomes meaningful when substantiated, and design is that substantiation.

From making comes creative confidence, and from creative confidence can emerge leadership. Strategy, in politics and organizations, is shaped by people having new ideas, the unabashed assurance that their ideas will succeed, and the tenacity to bring them to life. Design as a process offers that substantiation. On the way towards the creation of a new idea is a generative process of evidence, and that evidence serves not only to convince others, but to build the stubbornness of creative clarity and visioning of how the future will be. Students learn this confidence through continual project work, supporting their creative moves with argument drawn from research and from interpretation. When developed most richly, students are able to present an idea as if it must exist, because they feel its existence is inevitable.

These are the qualities at risk if the sentiment from design educators accurately represents what is happening in the design studio classroom. Without taking risks, or making things, or soliciting criticism, or developing an ability to be critical, students cannot learn that the world is malleable. It's less likely that they will develop a point of view about how things might be, or the ability to convince others of the validity of that point of view. They won't be able to substantiate their design moves and decisions with confidence.

It's common to equate higher education with professional development. Given the cost of tuition, it would be criminal to avoid the conversation of "return" on a student's investment in time and money. But the conversation often equates skill development with that readiness for professional practice, as if methods and techniques justify the educational experience. The real value in design education is in the aforementioned development of a designerly identity. Methods can be taught without any of the core constructs identified through this research: there is no need for rich criticism, risk taking, a close-knit community, or any of the other qualities that are recognized as fundamental to the pedagogy of studio. In fact, there is no need for studio at all. Methods can be effectively learned in a textbook, or through a video.

The research points to a fundamental problem with modern design education: from the faculty's perspective, many of the grounding qualities of a designerly pedagogy are now difficult, or at times impossible, for today's students to engage with. It's tempting to fault K–12 education for emphasizing performance and compliance, social media for intensifying scrutiny and bullying, or online learning for normalizing isolation and disengagement. But assigning blame does little to address the underlying issue. The reality described by faculty is that the inherited studio model is unlikely to become effective again in its current form, raising a more consequential question about how design should now be taught.

This research has identified the challenges instructors describe when they try to implement the traditional pedagogy of studio with today's students. The data clearly questions if the old model is still viable in its current form; interpretation of the data shows that underlying each of the pedagogical challenges that faculty perceive are larger intents, intents that might be able to be translated into a different or experimental studio style. Specifically, each of the seven contradictions identified in the research is built on a larger educational outcome and goal, as described in the chart below.

One major contribution of this research, then, is in identifying the qualities of studio pedagogy that transcend their implementation—the success criteria that should frame future approaches to building design educational structures. The success criteria transcend the teaching and learning mechanism; there's no logical reason that, for example, criticality needs to emerge from a group pinup, or comparison needs to occur through listening in to a desk crit, or working through complexity requires long studio classes. It is hard to conceive of studio teaching and learning without these things, but that is because of how we have collectively decided to define a studio, not because they are intrinsically tied to learning to become a designer.

It is unlikely that the generation of learners that are entering design schools will change back to how they "used to be," and forcing an old model with new learners is, according to faculty in this study, not working. This research points to a need for faculty to return to the basic learning outcomes, ignore the historic mechanisms through which these have been achieved, and consider the modern context in which design education occurs.

Conclusion

Today's design faculty describe students whose behaviors appear misaligned with studio expectations and inherited approaches to teaching and learning design; these behaviors are better understood as rational responses to contemporary educational, social, and economic conditions. The framework presented here distinguishes pedagogical intent from instructional form, and argues that the contradictions between student learning experiences and faculty teaching practices are resolvable. The contradictions reflect differences in method, not in underlying pedagogical theory. The contribution of this work lies in articulating faculty perspectives on these tensions and in offering a framework for translating established studio learning aims into instructional approaches that remain viable under present conditions.

Notes

All participants in this study teach in the United States, and it is recognized that these findings may have limited applicability in other countries where design is taught and learned. The findings and discussion focus on students that were described by participants as younger, characterized as being in their late teens or early twenties. It's clear that there are many students enrolled in design programs who are older, and it's unlikely that the findings described here that are tied to generational tendencies generalize to those groups. Further research is necessary to understand how these elements impact design studio teaching and learning.

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