Forget to Clean Up When You're Done

Critical Analysis

In this text, the authors identify several concepts necessary for implementing a studio successfully; they emphasize the unique physical space requirements that support effective studio teaching and learning.

Design studios require information permanence; this allows designers who work at different paces to track progress on a project. Information permanence is supported by artifacts, such as sketches, diagrams, and so-on. But permanence requires physical space, and “even design programs—stubborn hold-outs against neutrality [in space use]—have succumbed to university-wide scheduling and classroom allocation systems.” Without dedicated space, design programs patch together different approximations of workspace. One manner is to use shared spaces as lecture space, but “students end up with no privacy—workspaces that should be dedicated to them become public teaching spaces.”

The authors name spaces that support permanence “manifest spaces,” where evidence of use is gathered over time; “neutral spaces” are those that return to the way they were at the beginning of use. Manifest spaces offer several benefits. One is that time is not wasted recovering work from the previous class. Another is that there is a “cognitive benefit to students being able to pick up where they left off quickly and efficiently,” and these spaces can be used outside of assigned class time. The benefit of “having the work in progress remain on display is that it can serve as a basis for critique at any time, including outside of assigned classroom time.”

Design requires a constant process of making and remaking; learning this process is experiential, and it has been suggested that these rooms should be treated like “lifelong kindergartens,” so as to enable playful low-stakes experimentation. This iterative process is “far more difficult to demonstrate when work takes place in the virtual environment that when ideas are embedded in material form” because older iterations are lost instead of accumulated.

Research Value

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

• Provides further evidence of the need for externalization of content in the studio