Critical Analysis
Studio appears, from the outside, abusive in its demands for time. It seems that students are encouraged to spend as much time as possible in the studio, and that faculty do everything in their power to build a culture of presence. This is evidenced in the various amenities provided to students, the pervasive discussion of studio culture, the integrated nature of desks, classroom and equipment, and the literal expectations set as to the amount of time expected to complete an assignment. It appears that instructors are encouraging a form of perverted clock-time: a focus on hours spent, similar to a factory, yet seemingly without bounds.
This may be an inverted view of the instructor’s intention.
Clock-time is often juxtaposed with task-based time. Task-based time views time as embedded within an activity. A task takes as long as it takes, and the duration is tied intimately to the skill required to complete the task. A task is a closed-system. Time is an attribute subservient to completion, and quality is given an opportunity to take a precedent. Simply, there is no hurry (there is no need for delay, either), and there’s an opportunity for workmanship to shine.
When understood as this juxtaposition, instructors’ demands seem more appropriate. Their emphasis on time-in-studio can be seen as an emphasis on learning task time and unlearning expectations of clock time. Students enter studio with a high likelihood of training in clock time, where what they do is tied intimately to an externality. For children, their time is not their own, but they learn through experience that it may never really by their own: it is integrated into a culture where time is a commodity. Their schedule is blocked in chunks and things are orchestrated around a clock.
From this perspective, an emphasis on time-in-studio can be explained as an attempt to learn to be more competent in order to view design as a task, one that is self-contained and one that takes as long as it takes. Efforts to keep students in studio, perceived as a form of chronopolitical training for industry, is generously understood as a way to teach the opposite: to help students grow into designers that understand time as something that is intimately related to the work, not to the job. This is in the spirit of the pre-industrial world, where, describing ancient Greece, Ingold argues that “Every artisan trade—with its specific instruments, raw materials and products, its technical operations and the qualities required of its practitioners - was a separate system rather than part of an all-embracing division of labour” (7). He calls this a “task-orientation,” where “work and time are intrinsic to the conduct of life itself” (7). This is not to say that all one does is toil; it is an argument that working time should be discussed in terms of competence, not in terms of a schedule.”
Ingold argues that because this closed system of tasks and time is unique to the persons doing the tasks, “the particular kinds of tasks that a person performs are an index of his or her personal and social identity: the tasks you do depend on who you are, and in a sense the performance of certain tasks makes you the person you are” (8).
Instructors are not encouraging an extensive commitment to time in studio in order to inculcate students into a professional practice of demeaning labor—they are not endorsing chronopolitics. They are encouraging time in studio in order to teach the competence necessary to manage that self-contained system of work, and to help students integrate with the larger system of designerly work, as “a person's integration within such a system may be an index of his or her very belonging to locality and community” (9). From a task-based view, this is a generous encouragement of social participation.
In discussing Thompson’s view of capitalism, Ingold describes the trading of time as the definition of the system itself—that “a certain class of people, lacking direct access to the means to procure a livelihood, have to sell or rent out their very capacity to work to an employer, who owns the means of production, in return for a money wage with which they can purchase the necessities for their subsistence” (10). These people are selling their time; Ingold explains that this is the essence of the phrase “time is money,” as if quantity is better than quality and time is a commodity than be spent wisely or “squandered” (13).
Instructors, likely without knowing it, are trying to teach their students the direct access to the means to procure a livelihood precisely so they don’t need to engage in this time trade; so they can view the value of their work as what can be offered in exchange for money, rather than their effort to make the work. It is an attempt to escalate a designer’s value; it is a strategic move. Task-orientation, as described by Ingold, is “person-centric, it follows implicit ‘rules of thumb’ rather than explicitly codified procedures, its objectives are set within the current of activity among all those involved in the work situation… and—most importantly—it is constitutive of personal and social identity” (19). This bears a close similarity to the generally accepted view of craft and workmanship. This indicates that the seemingly obtuse ways instructors are encouraging students to essentially live in the studio are attempts to instill a sense of craft and to help students embrace the “contained system” of designing, where the externality of time is largely disregarded. It is a pursuit of quality.