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

This is a revised version of this article, based on revisions requested during the submission process. Original here.

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), their work is displayed on the walls (Fallman, 2007), and studio spaces may have casual, more domestic areas such as lounges or kitchens (Thoring, Desmet, & Badke-Schaub, 2018). Professors rarely lecture (Orr & Shreeve, 2018), and instead circulate among students (Hokanson, 2012), have one on one or small group discussions (Goldschmidt, Hochman, & Dafni, 2010), and prompt much of their teaching based on the artifacts that students make (Shaffer, 1997). 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). Work is critiqued in addition to being graded (Dannels, Housley Gaffney, & Norris Martin, 2008), and subjective feedback guides experiential learning (Williams, Ostwald, & Haugen, 2010). These qualities (along with others) support the development of reflective practice (Cross 1982; Cennamo & Brandt 2012).

These qualities have a long, established historical precedent and have remained generally consistent over time. Phelan (1981) 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). 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), 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), and may be taking care of children while simultaneously enrolled (Institute for Women's Policy Research, 2019).

It’s unclear what happens when today’s students encounter dated studio pedagogy, and this background framed the research questions of this study. These research questions are:

• Do instructors feel current students are able to effectively learn when confronted with pedagogy developed in the 1930s?
• Do instructors 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 instructors see students as emotionally unsophisticated, and that leveraging established design pedagogy is untenable. More specifically, instructors feel that today’s students fear critique, being seen, and publicly committing to an opinion, and instructors describe how students 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 instructors’ 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 instructors 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

Many modern studio learning practices are adaptations of workshop and apprenticeship models of technical training. The Bauhaus curriculum had a foundations course, which emerged as one of the most influential parts of modern art and design education. The course was analytical in nature, and emphasized both craft and methodical investigation of separate parts of art-making. This has become a ubiquitous way of teaching and thinking about art and design, and the Bauhaus “formalized those approaches which are now virtually dogma in the teaching of studio” (Phelan, 1981).

In this Bauhaus-inspired 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). 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). 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). 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 (1998, p. 61) 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. (2018) 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) 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. These surfaces become tools for critique, as well, and when students present their work, they must “establish a connection between the wall, themselves, and the audience,” highlighting the interplay between visual and verbal modes of expression. Instructors emphasize that students must “learn to become critical” and to “propel forward thinking about a design project” (2005, pp. 147-148).

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)—it is the “active pedagogy of the studio” (Hokanson, 2012, p. 74).

These ideas indicate that studio teaching and learning must be conducted in a physical space, and synchronously. COVID has forced educators to consider how these constructs might be offered in online and hybrid environments. Open-ended spatial software, like Miro, became a central and lasting space that operates not only as a container for visual artifacts, but as a “communal, live space” that offers “the opportunity to compare student projects and progress and gain feedback between students, tutors, peers and external stakeholders” (Spruce, Moriarty, & Norcross, 2024). It is akin to the artful surfaces described above, and allows for the same sort of casual engagement around design artifacts, even when not engaging with them directly. Kampen, Galperin, Jager, Noel, & Strube (2022) argue that these types of platforms also encourage a plurality of voices, well beyond those that might engage in a physical space; they describe that “Our community has become global: visiting scholars, artists, designers, or learners join discussions and critiques in real-time from anywhere. The participation of many voices—the public impacted by the focus issue, guest lecturers from other schools, community residents, representatives from industry—enriches learner outcomes and decenters the instructor.” Even in an online or hybrid environment, the same qualities persist—showing work, being public, and being critiqued.

The qualities described above 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). Oh, et al. (2013) note that some students experience trauma—“damage to self-esteem”—during public critique. 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) 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. The studio is analogous to an ecology, where “some organisms cooperate, some compete, and others are bound together in predator-prey relationship” (McDonald & Michela, 2019).

Just as Bauhaus offered unique forms of teaching and learning, it was also intense and expectant of students, containing live-in studios and encouragement for spending as much time in studio as possible (Anthony, 2011, p. 224). Webster (2006) describes that students often work through the night, neglecting sleep and personal routines, and these long hours are held up as points of pride; students customize their personal areas with “candy and other junk-food wrappers pinned up as merit badges for work done through the hours of the night” (Williamson-Shaffer, 2007, p. 105).

In noting these dynamics, and others, Ward (1990) has argued that “what is needed is no less than a radical transformation of our design education system,” and has suggested that the entire process of design education needs to become more democratized—essentially, extracted from its historical roots. Yet that goal, from 1990, may still not have been realized.

In summary, studio pedagogy demands students form and assert opinions, seek out criticism, present their work even when it’s incomplete, work long hours, and work publicly; design studio pedagogy requires that students be 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. 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, it’s likely that students 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). Over half of full-time undergraduate students balance coursework with paid employment (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020), some working across multiple jobs; 22% (or almost 4 million) undergraduate students are parents (Conway, Wladis, & Hachey, 2021), 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, 2018), 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) and associated with rising levels of anxiety and depression, particularly in young adults (Primack, et al., 2017). Some of 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).

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 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 a meaningful negative impact on their expectations of studio learning—and if these qualities have had an 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, and what strategies, if any, 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 instructors perceive students’ abilities to engage in that practice; instructors 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

Research data was analytically explored through an iterative process of theming data, analyzing discourse, and developing narrative.

Categories of content were developed in a bottom-up fashion by visually mapping 1,310 verbatim utterances, combined from all interviews, based on thematic similarity. These categories were framed as action-oriented statements from the perspective of an instructor (such as “Studying design in a physical studio leads to more intimate learning moments.”) These statements were then grouped into broader insight themes, interpreted as patterns in how participants perceive studio to function as a pedagogical whole. The goal of categorical theming was to illustrate consistencies and anomalies in data, and to identify eccentricities or index elements; this is in the spirit of noting index cases in research data as anchor points, as described by Timmermans & Tavory (2022).

Concurrently, individual transcript segments associated with each developing theme were re-analyzed through a lens of participants’ language selection. Transcripts were examined guided by Gee’s Building Tasks of Language (2014), which identified the things participants were making more or less important, the activities they were highlighting as most critical for teaching and learning, and the language they were using to describe their students. The goal of this language analysis was to examine why participants were saying the things they said, and to interrogate the unique terms and sentiment that participants selected in support of their statements.

This analysis was captured through individual written interpretive narratives of approximately 500 words each, which identified how participants construct meanings about their experiences in studio, view and evaluate studio-based learning as a pedagogy, and frame 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 tried to accomplish. The goal of this narrative development was to contextualize the theming and language analysis in a story of a participant.

This process of theming, analysis of language and the writing of narrative was repeated three times, with each iteration becoming more focused and interpretative. Action-oriented insight themes were reduced from 89 groupings to 11, and then to 7; transcription language analysis was similarly focused. The output of this process was a set of core findings. 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; these findings are discussed in the subsequent section.

This analysis process, while rigorous, is not neutral. My experiences and perspectives shape the design and interpretation of this research. I come to this work as a design educator, and with a critical stance toward modern design educational practices. I am deeply concerned about the future for design students who are completing their studies and preparing to begin their careers, as well as with the large cost and high stakes of design education. Rather than claiming neutrality, I view my subjectivity as a resource that allows me to approach this inquiry with both critical distance and insight based on experience.

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. Instructors believe that students only want to share things if they are perfect.

Studio pedagogy depends on the routine exposure of unfinished work, but instructors describe how students struggle with showing incomplete creative work. Instructors think 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 judgment. 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, instructors 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.”

Faculty understand a relationship between output and identity, where students treat “good ideas” as evidence that they themselves have worth. Letting someone see an artifact in process is to show a vulnerability, one that is tied to identity development. It’s likely that some students aren’t avoiding feedback as much as they are avoiding opportunities to be exposed to their peers and to themselves, and incomplete or early iterations of a design provide that exposure. Showing things that are incomplete is entirely at odds with many common approaches to secondary education, and it's unreasonable to expect students to abandon a teaching style that they’ve become accustomed to, without formal instruction and practice in the new way of working.

Studio requires taking risks. Instructors see students playing 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. Individual anxieties may come from a broader educational system that systematically rewards cautious rule-following, and for some students, the stakes are extremely high because they are on scholarships or visas that require a certain level of performance.

Jeff, an Associate Professor of Practice of Design at a large public university, sees risk-taking 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.

Instructors 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.

If students are waiting for permission, they may be reading the studio environment for evidence that experimentation is genuinely desired: that proposing something unrefined and unexpected won’t be ridiculed or dismissed out of hand. This speaks to environmental conditions in a studio as much as to the confidence of a student; traditional studio pedagogy that embraces aggressive, constant criticism overtly signals to students unfamiliar with unspoken norms of crit that exploration is very much not permitted.

Studio requires giving and receiving criticism. Instructors worry that 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. Criticality has been systematically eroded in American schools, and instructors see this impacting not only how students behave in a crit, but how they develop a broad skill of opinion development.

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.

But both Tim (teaching at a public university) and Ernest (teaching at an exclusive 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.”

Aaron may be correct in noting that students come to school unprepared to offer a critical opinion, but Tim and Ernest show that the lack of preparation shouldn’t be confused with apathy. Students likely have things to say and opinions to offer, but have not been given opportunities to speak their mind and have their thoughts taken seriously; they may also lack the language necessary to simply articulate ideas that are new and complex to them.

Studio requires being engaged. Instructors see passivity in their students.

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.

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.

It's easy to blame student passivity on apathy or disengagement, but it’s more likely that students have different levels of confidence and extroversion, and that some students have been systematically excluded from conversations in the classroom in the past. Faculty who view students as disinterested may not be giving students the structures they need to fully “lean in” to an educational experience.

Studio requires doing things for a long period of time. Instructors observe students struggling to focus.

Studio pedagogy presumes sustained, collaborative engagement over long periods of time. Students can’t make that work, given the complexities of their lives. This is viewed 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, instructors 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.”

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.”

These faculty note that students struggle to remain focused over long periods of time, but fail to acknowledge that most people struggle to remain focused over long periods of time. Many jobs are built around a rhythm of working and taking breaks. Creative work requires long periods of focused attention, but it’s unreasonable to expect that focused attention to happen on demand, and if students come to expect that dedicated working time as they enter the workforce, they will be confused when they encounter the 30 and 60 minute blocks of time that have been formalized as appropriate for corporate work.

Studio assessment is subjective. Instructors feel that 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.

Instructors 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.

Some instructors 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.” This is reasonable, given the high cost of education, but instructors view it as an affront on the natural curiosity they expect in their students.

But instructors insist that subjectivity is not a flaw of studio assessment; instead, it is a core way of examining artifacts that are made as students work to become competent designers. 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.

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. Instructors 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.

Studio requires being public. Instructors feel that students prefer to hide.

Studio pedagogy requires sustained public presence, but students arrive having learned that success depends on staying invisible. This is part of a larger cultural story, attributed to generational experience with social media and online learning.

Instructors insist 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. While using headphones may be a way for students to focus, and may actually be required for some students to participate, these instructors view these tools as signs of apathy.

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, instructors 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.” This implies that the withdrawal does not only impact participation in class; it also negatively impacts commitment during the process of design, which is required to move a design through the process of iteration.

While 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. It’s unrealistic to expect them to enter into a foreign, high-stakes educational experience and suddenly shrug off the weight of these cultural and societal burdens. Faculty see students hiding; students may be doing all they can to survive with the limited social tools they have been provided.

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 an instructor’s 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 instructors 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 toward 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. Therefore, for this pedagogy to come to life, instructors require students to be brave, to take risks, to assert an opinion, and to be exposed.

But there is a consensus among instructors that today’s design students are emotionally unprepared to do these things. Alycia asks,

Alycia’s language shows her deflecting responsibility for change, as she feels that 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 context 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 become 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 toward 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 discussion often equates skill development with the 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 offered in a textbook, or through a video.

The research points to two fundamental problems with modern design education.

First, from an instructor’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. The methods and approaches that these instructors learned during their own education don’t work, and they struggle to find alternatives.

Next, these well-meaning instructors also inadvertently and implicitly assign blame to the students themselves. The instructors struggle to find a root cause of the system they see as broken, faulting everything from K–12 education for emphasizing performance and compliance, to social media for intensifying scrutiny and bullying, to online learning for normalizing isolation and disengagement; yet they consistently return to describing students as the problem. Each of the instructors in this study speaks of a passion for helping students and a deep sense of caring for the well-being of those in their studio, and that seems to be said in earnest. But faced with a studio of students that seem to be underperforming, blame is ultimately aimed at the students themselves.

An early reviewer of this paper correctly identified that faculty describe the student experience from a deficit frame—as if the student is problematic, not the faculty, the teaching, or the educational system. This is emblematic of the problem of studio culture itself; some instructors feel that they “paid their dues” in studios of the past, and use this as a point of reference to shape their expectations of students today. Some are even aware of the way this shifts blame to the shoulders of students. Chad, teaching for over 25 years, explained that “I hear my voice now when we're talking about this, and I certainly hear this more directly and more explicitly from other faculty, but, they mourn some version of what it used to be: ‘back when I was a kid, I lived in a studio in the middle of the street, and I ate gravel.’ You know, that's of zero use.” This one-dimensional perspective demands additional research to understand and represent the views of students, as described by students.

Assigning blame does little to address the underlying issue. The reality described by instructors 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 whether the old model is still viable in its current form; interpretation of the data shows that underlying each of the pedagogical challenges that instructors 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 above.

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 are independent of 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 who are entering design schools will be successful if they are presented with a model of how it “used to be,” and forcing an old model with new learners is, according to instructors in this study, not working. This research points to a need for instructors 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 instructors 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 instructor teaching practices are resolvable. The contradictions reflect differences in method, not in underlying pedagogical theory. The contribution of this work lies in articulating instructor 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 and future research directions

All participants in this study teach in the United States, and these findings may have limited applicability in other countries where design is taught and learned. The findings and discussion focus on students who were described by participants as younger, characterized as being in their late teens or early twenties. 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. Additionally, future research can be used to identify evidence-based strategies that are already in use and can be applied within the pedagogical translation framework.

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