Chronopolitics: The role of time in design studio education

Introduction

Design studio is a defining model of design education. It is a physical environment and a pedagogical approach, characterized by extended periods of making, critique, reflection, experimentation, and social interaction. Students spend large amounts of time in studio spaces, working with other students, engaging with instructors, and developing an understanding of what it means to become a designer. Embedded within this model is a complicated relationship with time. Studio education is structured around long class periods. The projects are ambiguous and have vague timelines. Unlike educational environments where learning is organized around specific lessons and managed blocks of time, studio work often expands and contracts according to the needs of the project. Creative work requires exploration, reflection, experimentation, revision, and uncertainty, making the time required difficult to predict.

These time-based expectations are social. When students spend time working, they signal to their instructors that they are engaged and developing designerly expertise. Studio spaces are intentionally designed to encourage presence, with dedicated desks, shared amenities, and social environments that support extended work.

Chronopolitics provides a way of examining this tension by exploring how time, labor, power, and social expectations are intertwined in the studio. Chronopolitics argues the distinction between clock time—time as a unit of measure that is extrinsic to any given task—and task time, specific to a given interaction or activities. This paper explores the role of time in design studio education through an analysis of instructor and student discourse, as seen through a lens of chronopolitics. Drawing on research with faculty and students, this paper examines how both groups describe time, effort, presence, and work in studio environments. By considering these descriptions from a chronopolitical standpoint, this paper questions one of the most enduring assumptions of design education: that spending more time in studio leads to becoming a better designer.

The time rhythms of studio teaching and learning

Design studio is a unique educational model for teaching and learning design. Studio refers to the physical space in which classes are conducted, and also to the pedagogy of teaching.

Design studio operates with a sense of time that differs from many traditional educational experiences. Class time can stretch to six hours, and these long blocks continue across a student’s multi-year course of study (Cennamo and Brandt 2012, 840)Cennamo, Katherine, and Carol Brandt. 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.. Extended class time includes formal instruction, informal and impromptu instruction (“Let’s all gather around here”), individual and group critique, and unallocated time; this unallocated time is typically used for project work and casual conversation about both project-related and unrelated topics. “Regular studio sessions tend to be long and open-ended” (Rosa and Ferreira 2023, 2026)Rosa, Carlos, and João Ferreira. 2023. “The distant studio: a survey of design students’ experience with distance educational formats.” International Journal of Technology and Design Education 33: 2019–2043. doi:10.1007/s10798-022-09804-8., and for students, "the design studio process can be mystifying" because "the instructor cannot really explain until the student has already begun" (Ochsner 2000, 195)Ochsner, Jeffrey Karl. 2000. “Behind the mask: A psychoanalytic perspective on interaction in the design studio.” Journal of Architectural Education 53 (4): 194-206.. The work itself prompts instruction on what to do next, and students are left to understand the working cadence themselves. Pacing depends on each student’s use of materials, collaboration, and reflection. Jones (2022, 7)Jones, Derek. 2022. “Exploring studio proximities: Space, time, being.” Proceedings of the Design Research Society. Bilbao: Design Research Society. doi:10.21606/drs.2022.344. describes the studio as both “planned and unplanned,” where each moment arises from overlapping activities and “advising a student to do ‘smaller’ or ‘larger’ bits [is] entirely dependent on the circumstances.”

For an instructor, synchronization becomes one of the most culturally significant aspects of time in structures like a studio, where it becomes obvious that work is relational and must be somehow organized to reinforce cooperation (Fine 1990, 97)Fine, Gary Alan. 1990. “Organizational time: temporal demands and the experience of work in restaurant kitchens.” Social Forces 69 (1): 95-114.. An instructor provides scheduling guardrails for the project and identifies key milestones or deliverable dates, leaving the space in-between those milestones undefined in order to recognize the fluidity of the process of design. This is a bracketing of time, where working in a small setting that is in asynchronous motion with staggered schedules and inconsistent needs means acting with a sense of choreography. Several dimensions of temporal organization—periodicity, tempo, timing, duration, and sequence—influence how work unfolds and how it feels. The synchronization of tasks, the sequencing of actions, and the pacing of labor together form the way work is done (110)Fine, Gary Alan. 1990. “Organizational time: temporal demands and the experience of work in restaurant kitchens.” Social Forces 69 (1): 95-114..

As a result of extended project timelines, long periods of class time, loosely choreographed working times, and the serendipitous nature of creativity, a unique rhythm of studio is established, and once bounded, it acts as an often unstated contract and commitment by both instructors and students (Fine 1990)Fine, Gary Alan. 1990. “Organizational time: temporal demands and the experience of work in restaurant kitchens.” Social Forces 69 (1): 95-114.. These are the temporal rhythms described by Reddy et al. (2006, 40)Reddy, Madhu C., Paul Dourish, and Wanda Pratt. 2006. “Temporality in medical work: Time also matters.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 15: 29–53. doi:10.1007/s10606-005-9010-z. as the way activities repeat and overlap, and they are “knitted together to create a collective whole.”

Time is largely considered to be objective, and located outside of people—it is something that pushes forward and is something people endure. However, “it is critical to recognize that the experience of time also has a social component” (Reddy, Dourish and Pratt 2006, 30)Reddy, Madhu C., Paul Dourish, and Wanda Pratt. 2006. “Temporality in medical work: Time also matters.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 15: 29–53. doi:10.1007/s10606-005-9010-z.. The way studio time is experienced gives it meaning, and that meaning is largely created by the social and cultural patterns of the studio. Students leverage strategies of temporality, or are influenced by them, to help them work effectively; students “experience time through temporal structures that they reify through recurrent use in their everyday practices” (34)Reddy, Madhu C., Paul Dourish, and Wanda Pratt. 2006. “Temporality in medical work: Time also matters.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 15: 29–53. doi:10.1007/s10606-005-9010-z..

The perceptions of studio time by instructors and students

This paper explores time and studio by examining research data from two studies, one with instructors and one with students. The goal is to understand how time is described by both groups as it relates to the studio educational experience. Do instructors and students describe studio time in the same way? Do either group take a notable rhetorical stance when they describe studio time? Does time, and an urgency to work, show up in the discourse of studio, and what might be the implications of this language on pedagogy?

By exploring these questions, this text works to provoke larger questions about the structures that design educators have put in place in support of how design is taught, and to encourage introspection on foundational studio practices that may go unquestioned.

Study design

To answer these questions, research was conducted with instructors and students. Two separate research efforts inform this work.

Methodology: research with instructors

In the first study, semi-structured, 1:1 interviews were conducted via Zoom with 25 design instructors (each between 60-90 minutes), using an interview protocol focused on three topics: the instructor’s experiences teaching in a design studio environment, the elements of studio considered fundamental to studio pedagogy, and the elements that constitute a design studio culture.

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.

Table 1. Instructor participant information

Methodology: research with students

In the second study, research was conducted to understand how students describe their studio experiences and what their language signals about their emergent designerly values and priorities. This study combined interviews and self-produced short videos (“selfies”), prompted via text message, to gather data about students’ studio perspectives. Students responded to text message prompts by recording short videos. This data collection approach builds on Larson & Csikszentmihalyi’s (1992)Larson, Reed, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. 1992. “Validity and reliability of the Experience Sampling Method.” In The Experience of Psychopathology: Investigating Mental Disorders in their Natural Settings, edited by Marten de Vries, 43–57. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511663246.006. Experience-Sampling Method, extends the Selfie Study approach (Kolko 2025)Kolko, Jon. 2025. “Generative design through selfies.” interactions (ACM) 32 (2): 22-23., and leverages video diary-making methods introduced by Whiting et al. (2018)Whiting, Rebecca, Helen Roby, Gillian Symon, and Petros Chamakiotis. 2018. “Participant-led video diaries.” In Unconventional Methodology in Organization and Management Research, edited by Alan Bryman and David A. Buchanan, 190-211. New York: Oxford University Press. and Lau and Bratby (2024)Lau, Annica, and May Bratby. 2024. “Collecting qualitative data via video statements in the digital era.” Labour and Industry 34 (2): 101-113.. During the study, each student received the same prompts in the same sequence and responded with 3- to 5-minute videos. Prompts asked students to (a) film and narrate a studio tour, (b) describe a recent project and critique, (c) describe the work style and content of a student they respect, (d) compare their studio to visual examples of other studio spaces, and (e) respond to hypothetical faculty statements about studio culture. After five weeks of video data collection, students participated in a 60-minute semi-structured Zoom interview.

Participants

Students were recruited through advertisements posted to public forums (such as LinkedIn) and faculty-focused discussion threads requesting distribution to students. Participants were selected if they were English-speaking students living in the United States, over 18 years old, enrolled in an undergraduate (or equivalent) program, taking an in-person studio course in a form-giving design field (such as industrial, graphic, or user experience design), owned a mobile phone, and were enrolled in an educational program of at least one year in duration.

Table 2. Student participant information

Ethics and data collection

Both studies were approved by the researcher’s institution’s Institutional Review Board and included gaining verbal informed consent from each study participant. The recorded interviews, prompt responses, 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 text.

Data analysis

Both studies leverage discourse analysis as an approach to data analysis. Discourse analysis requires a commitment to the nature of words as active constructions of ideas, where ideas are brought to life through speech. Analysis is based on James Paul Gee’s (2014, 94-117)Gee, James Paul. 2014. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. 4th. New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315819679. “Seven Building Tasks of Language,” which prioritizes how things were said over what was said; points of linguistic escalation or trivialization provide clues into attitudes, priorities, and social ways of being.

Study one generated 1,310 utterances from instructors; study two generated 6,185 utterances from students. These verbatim utterances were examined to highlight when language escalated a topic or situation. Escalation was evidenced by the use of metaphor, analogy, simile, colloquialisms, effusiveness, and expansive characterizations. 499 of these escalations were identified in the combined data set.

These individual moments of extreme language were then inductively grouped based on similarity, and each group was summarized in a short discourse paragraph that described a unique way language is being used by students and faculty to describe their studio experiences. A narrative synthesis was developed that integrates primary elements of each discourse, resulting in the theoretical findings and subsequent discussion below.

Findings

Themes of time, work, and effort are embedded throughout studio discourse. During the research, all faculty and student participants emphasized, without prompting, the unique nature and demand of time in the studio. For faculty, time is described as a critical part of becoming a designer. They explain that part of studio education is for instilling a sense of creative time: helping students realize that doing design work follows a unique rhythm and extended duration of focus. For students, time is viewed as a demand of labor—they describe pressure to spend more hours working, and to work hard. Time for faculty is offered as a construct of creativity; for students, time is described as a metric of success.

Faculty describe time as an important quality of creative immersion and engagement

Faculty continually reference time as a critical part of design studio education. They emphasize the need for students to be present for long periods of time in studio, and connect this need to educational outcomes: they describe long hours as a fundamental part of growing into being a designer. More specifically, time is related to immersion and a meaningful engagement with problems and materials. Ernest explained that “I think as long as you remain really immersed and invested in the activity, whether that activity happens to be a making activity, or a critique activity, or a supportive conversation activity, or whatever, of all the kinds of activities that the studio allows, I think it's the immersion that's the important part. It's the commitment to being aggressively present in the task at hand, that's the important part.” Ernest is looking for his students to contribute their attention, and this shows up in studio through immersion over a long period of time. For Ernest, longer periods of working time are indicative of deeper engagement and a richer embodied sense of creative exploration.

Darren views his role as providing access to time for this form of deep working. He explains that “by providing the time for students to sit and think and work through the problems that were set in front of them, and then to express and create the artifacts of design that were necessary to communicate that solution… design takes time. And, you know, if you don't, like, take the time, you're shortcutting, I think, the process.”

Craig wants students to form not only a relationship with their work, but a relationship with the lineage of the profession itself. As he explains, “I feel like there's a history to the practice, that is important to understand. As we've got farther and farther along, less and less of that history is being carried over to students and new practitioners… being immersed in the messiness and the history of a design studio that has been there for decades.” Studio work is indicative of belonging in a practice.

Instructors describe a variety of things they do to encourage students to spend their time in the physical space of studio. These include providing unique equipment and facilities, adding comforts that treat the space more like a home than a workspace, encouraging a sense of community, and assigning work that is expected to take a long amount of time.

Most fundamental is said to be the provision of a dedicated workspace, a private desk that a student can claim and customize. Val explains, “I'm not sure that space matters all that much. I think it has to do with proximity. I mean, let me rephrase this. Space does matter. But proximity to people is important, and owning a space is important.” Owning, for her, is characterized by a student’s ability to leave materials, add personal touches, and present work in progress on the wall, without worry that it will be removed. Faculty connect dedicated workspace to long periods of uninterrupted work and the development of a cohort-based mentality. With a comfortable space, they explain, students will stay in studio, and when all students have a space, they will stay together and develop community and collaborative creativity. This, in turn, encourages students to remain in studio; all professors explain that studio should be a vibrant place where students choose to be present.

The students notice these efforts. Tingbing observes the convenience of the kitchen, Hana indicates that she appreciates the couch where she can relax and the coffee maker provided to students, and when asked if she could change one thing about studio, Candice requested a sofa; she explained that “being able to be comfortable would be, like, my thing, like… I could be comfortable just for, even just for a little bit. I’ve been working there for, like, 5 hours, and I've been like, okay, I want to, like, go, sit on my sofa, but I can't, like, I have more work to do.”

Students describe that studio success requires significant time, effort, and hard work

Candice’s discussion of a need to rest and relax is indicative of another major theme that emerged from research: students describe that their success in studio requires a significant amount of hard work, stretched over a long period of time.

All students described the need for staying at studio late, often all night long. Giada explained that “I've pulled several all-nighters before to finish projects. A lot of students actually do, like, I usually go with my friends late at night, and we just, like, work until the morning. It's not the best, but, like, sometimes you just… It's gotta get done.” Phil isn’t proud of his all-nighters, but explains that “I'm trying not to pull them, but they're kind of required at this point.”

Time is described as something that is finite. Kalie explains that “there is never enough time.” Hana says that “I also only had spring break to finish this,” and attributes the lack of time to what she perceives is a poor review from her professor; this is ongoing, she continues, as “we normally have a new [project] every, like, once a week… we normally had, like, a two-day deadline for graphic design.” Kalie describes her working strategy; “[work] can range anywhere from 2 hours to 4 hours, but then I, like, take small breaks in between, like, 10 to 15 minutes to go grab a snack or grab some water.” Hard work is said to take a toll. Allison indicates that “It can be exhausting being a designer, it can be a lot of work, it can be very tiring sometimes.” Candice agrees: “During class time, like, you're tired. You had a class before, you have a class after, and you're like, I really have, like, no energy left for the day.”

Students described long hours in relation to assignments that emphasize iteration, time, and speed. Nicole explains that, tasked with a drawing assignment, “our professor was like, okay, take each of those sketches, and then change them up a bit four separate times. And you need to do that for all of them. And it's due by the end of the week.” Hana had to “make 5 different, like, typographies. So it's… It does… it takes about… maybe, like, 4 hours, 3 hours, if I'm really, like, focused.” Chris described his friends’ project experiences, guessing that “this must be really overwhelming to them, because you have to do a booklet of 100 pages in one night. It must be really intimidating, and it must be really overwhelming for them, for sure.” Giada explained that in a typography project, “We had to write the same word a hundred times in, like, a hundred different ways… it was so hard, because we had to do it in a very short amount of time, and I'm somebody that takes a lot of time and, like, pays attention to very small details. I would say I'm very detail-oriented, so it was really hard for me because my teacher kept telling me, like, ‘Oh, you need to do this faster.’”

Students observe faculty emphasizing time on task. Latika recalls hearing this sort of time-based, rather than quality-based, expectation being set during a critique. She explains that a professor “gives you a feedback, like, ‘this doesn't look like three hours of work,’ and then I'm just like, ‘okay, then tell me which direction should I focus more on so that it looks like a 3-hour work done,’ you know? Sometimes there is no direction provided to you, and you just get stuck. Even if you're thinking about it for 3 hours, you are not able to produce anything, because you don't know what direction you go to.”

Discussion

This research has indicated that time and work take a central role in the discussion of design studio. Both instructors and students emphasize the importance of spending large periods of time in the design studio and dedicating that time to hard labor. Instructors describe that learning to spend time in studio is critical for developing a creative stance and a relationship with the professional practice of design, while students explain that working hard, for long hours, is largely the purpose of studio. It appears that there is a misaligned view of the role of studio time. One way to understand this potential misalignment is through a lens of chronopolitics, which is a framework for how time, work, and politics interact.

The clock time and task time of chronopolitics

Time measurement has been a form of tracking work cycles as far back as the 1400s (Thompson 1967)Thompson, E. P. 1967. “Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism.” Past and Present 38: 56-97., due to the necessity of working at certain hours of the day; for example, fishing could only be done during the day, and planting might need to be done at specific parts of the year. The sense of time passing in these contexts is one that is “more humanly comprehensible than timed labour” (38)Thompson, E. P. 1967. “Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism.” Past and Present 38: 56-97. because it is a time of necessity, connected to natural productivity and sustenance. Thompson refers to this way of working as task-based time, as the time it takes to complete a task is integral to the task itself, and is not imposed by others. Farming a plot of land takes as long as is necessary.

Early in the industrial revolution, working changed from this type of task-based work to time-based work, organized around a shift or schedule. Disciplinary time tools like “the time-sheet, the time-keeper, the informers and the fines” existed (Thompson 1967, 82)Thompson, E. P. 1967. “Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism.” Past and Present 38: 56-97.. This change brought a new balance between intense labor and the “freedom to be idle.” This is clock time, where the duration of work, not the output of work, is a unit to be traded. Time is now divided between someone’s “own” time and the time of their employer, and “the employer must use the time of his labour, and see it is not wasted… time is now currency: it is not passed but spent” (61)Thompson, E. P. 1967. “Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism.” Past and Present 38: 56-97..

Chronopolitics argues a distinction between clock time and task time, which are valuable tools for examining studio.

Clock time in studio

This research has shown that as students learn the rhythms of studio, they describe a norm of studio time as clock time. Working for long hours in the studio is viewed as a requirement for success. Time is described as an externality that plays a material role in design work.

Thompson’s arguments above describe clock time as time that is essentially owned by an employer. The word employer can easily be replaced with instructor; when Phil explained that he’s not trying to work all night, but it’s required of him, he’s indicating that his time is not his own but is instead owned and controlled by his instructor. But unlike a manager in a corporate environment, instructor pressure to remain in studio is not always overt. While an employer has formal mechanisms for managing time, studio expectations function as unstated mores. Providing students dedicated spaces and comfortable amenities serves as emotional leverage, a carrot rather than a stick. Some students may elect not to use those facilities, but their absence is obvious to the instructor and other students. Others may sense the need to remain in studio to indicate their commitment.

In a studio class session, instructors move slowly through the room from student to student in what is commonly called a desk crit, the “oral presentation that occurred in a one-on-one setting—between a faculty member and one individual student” (Dannels 2005, 144)Dannels, Deanna P. 2005. “Performing tribal rituals: A genre analysis of "crits" in design studios.” Communication Education 54: 136–160. doi:10.1080/03634520500213165.. The purported benefit of the practice is to provide one-on-one time with each student, but with an instructor established as a figure of authority, students must engage in this theoretically casual construct in order to ensure academic success. If a student doesn’t have an opportunity to meet with their instructor—perhaps because they are not there at the right time—they lose an opportunity to influence, and be influenced by, the assessment of their work; Goldschmidt et al. (2010, 285)Goldschmidt, Gabriela, Hagay Hochman, and Itay Dafni. 2010. “The design studio "crit": Teacher–student communication.” Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing 24: 285–302. doi:10.1017/S089006041000020X. explain that these desk crits “are of great importance to students who are eager to be positively assessed by their teachers and therefore listen carefully to their comments and suggestions.” Yet the desk crit is “facilitated without formal scheduling” and so a student must be present at the serendipitous moment, or miss a key learning and assessment opportunity.

Al Maani & Roberts (2023, 39)Al Maani, Duaa, and Jordan Andrew Roberts. 2023. “An attempt to understand the design studio as a distinctive pedagogical setting.” The International Journal of Design Education 17: 31–44. doi:10.18848/2325-128x/cgp/v17i02/31-44. note that this asymmetry of professor and student—considering who gets to speak, who waits, and when—can reproduce more traditional (hierarchical) classroom dynamics even in ostensibly open or flat studios. This choreographed nature of studio time is a clear example of Esposito and Becker’s claim (2023, 14)Esposito, Fernando, and Tobias Becker. 2023. “The time of politics, the politics of time, and politicized time: An introduction to chronopolitics.” History and Theory 62: 3–23. doi:10.1111/hith.12324. that time is “shaped, but not exclusively defined, by those in power.” The negotiation of temporal power, like the negotiation of space, is a defining feature of studio learning. The desk critique can function as a form of “nonaction” (18)Esposito, Fernando, and Tobias Becker. 2023. “The time of politics, the politics of time, and politicized time: An introduction to chronopolitics.” History and Theory 62: 3–23. doi:10.1111/hith.12324., where instructors keep some students waiting (potentially indefinitely) to exert influence. Fine (2018, 49)Fine, Gary Alan. 2018. Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. argues that “[studio] pedagogy makes a virtue of busyness.” A form of respected currency is the quantity time spent working, and some students are “overwhelmed with the pressure to keep producing.”

What emerges, then, is a time-discipline in studio that persists as a form of “time-thrift,” where time for students is something to be “consumed, marketed, put to use” and simply passing time is offensive and wasteful. Chronopolitics describes this dynamic of time as capital and a point of tension between instructors and students. In discussing Thompson’s view of capitalism, Ingold (Ingold 1995, 10)Ingold, Tim. 1995. “Work, Time and Industry.” Time & Society 4 (1): 5-28. 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.” Students are selling their time to instructors; 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 that can be spent wisely or “squandered” (13)Ingold, Tim. 1995. “Work, Time and Industry.” Time & Society 4 (1): 5-28.. This begs the question of what students are “buying” with their time; it may be knowledge, or it may be a grade.

Task time in studio

From the above perspective of studio as clock time, an educational studio can appear abusive in its demands for time. It seems that students are encouraged by those in power to spend as much time as possible in the studio, and that faculty take great efforts 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.

However, another explanation offers a more generous read of studio pedagogy, where design is seen as a task-based activity and “task hours” take precedence over “clock hours.” From this view, pressures by instructors to be present in studio are intended to help students extract themselves from the politics of time, and instructors are teaching them to view their work as an end in itself—to take pride in making, where design is free to take as long as it takes. 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” (Ingold 1995, 7)Ingold, Tim. 1995. “Work, Time and Industry.” Time & Society 4 (1): 5-28..

Instructors argue that a “commitment to hard work” is required to succeed in art and design education, and “’the work’ is the center of the creative practice. The ‘work’ is also synonymous with the person of the student and is an integral part of their professional identity” (Orr and Shreeve 2018, 72)Orr, Susan, and Alison Shreeve. 2018. Art and design pedagogy in higher education: Knowledge, values and ambiguity in the creative curriculum. New York: Routledge.. Some students are “in the studio a lot, thereby keeping in regular dialogue with tutors.” It’s argued that they are on their way towards becoming a designer, as “creative education is about identity formation.” Time has been said to be an essential quality of design studio education. Scholars have offered evidence that the long hours of studio immersion are valuable. Webster (2008, 67)Webster, Helena. 2008. “Architectural education after Schön: cracks, blurs, boundaries and beyond.” Journal for Education in the Built Environment 3 (2): 63-74. notes that by “spending long hours in studio, and living in houses with other architectural students,” students performed better than those who focused only on the skills of architecture; she concludes that “it appears that students who take a deep approach to learning by fully engaging with the world of architecture appear to gain an understanding of the culture of the discipline.” Schön (1987, 311)Schön, Donald A. 1987. Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. states that “students do not so much attend these [studio] events as live in them. And the work of a reflective practicum takes a long time… nothing is so indicative of progress in the acquisition of artistry as the student’s discovery of the time it takes.”

When studio activities are seen as “tasks,” instructors’ demands seem appropriate. Their emphasis on time-in-studio can be seen as a way of learning task time and unlearning expectations of clock time. Students enter studio with a high likelihood of training in clock time. Adam (1990, 104-105)Adam, Barbara. 1990. Time and social theory. Oxford: Polity Press. notes that “even the most cursory look at contemporary school life reveals that everything is timed”—that “layer upon layer of such schedules form the structure of our education system.” She continues to observe that school activities are allocated and structured for pre-set durations, and the durations dictate when and how learning occurs; the content itself is not the measure by which education is contained. This is pervasive, as “every single timing, synchronization, and allocation is in turn nested within a multiplicity of others, from an ‘educational plan’ down to the didactic detail of the time structure of individual lessons” (105)Adam, Barbara. 1990. Time and social theory. Oxford: Polity Press.. The goal is to instill and experience predictability—clock time, like “machine time,” is designed to the “ideal of invariability” (106)Adam, Barbara. 1990. Time and social theory. Oxford: Polity Press..

It’s reasonable to expect students who come to design school to anticipate this form of planned, structured, organized schedule. It makes sense, then, that students struggle to understand this new feeling of time—that creative work is unstructured, and that expectations are to spend a lot of time in studio working. If instructors do not explicitly describe why they emphasize task-time, it’s likely that students will misunderstand the expectation and view the norms of studio as “more time spent is better.” Working through a design problem takes time—as much time as it takes—and instructors’ focus on presence can be seen as a call for a transcendence of the norms students have grown accustomed to. This transcendence, Adam argues, is used in the context of time measurement to indicate when one rejects the notion of clock time entirely, and returns to view time as something specific to a task. This requires control, and “not whether time is under the control of self or others but whether clock time has become related to as being time seems to determine whether or not time itself is controlled” (Adam 1990, 126)Adam, Barbara. 1990. Time and social theory. Oxford: Polity Press..

These optimistic views of studio time are deeply entrenched in pedagogical history. As far back as 1919, Walter Gropius, master of the school at Bauhaus who “prided himself on not doing ‘anything by force,’ felt very strongly that rules and regulations—indeed any imposing of his will on others—represented a particularly odious vestige of Wilhelminian mentality. He also believed that students ultimately learned best by themselves; he worried that too many rules would turn Bauhaus into just another art academy. Rigidity was to be avoided. Bauhaus students received no grades. No classes were required, nor was attendance taken” (Hochman 1997, 83)Hochman, Elaine S. 1997. Bauhaus: crucible of modernism. New York: Fromm International.. Anthony (2011, 224)Anthony, Kathryn. 2011. “Design studios.” In Companion to urban design, edited by Tridib Banerjee and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, 223-237. New York: Routledge. describes that the model of Bauhaus was intense and expectant of students, containing live-in studios; this demeanor persists, and “most architecture faculty still rely on the traditional studio model, encouraging students to work in studio as much as possible” (235)Anthony, Kathryn. 2011. “Design studios.” In Companion to urban design, edited by Tridib Banerjee and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, 223-237. New York: Routledge.. Studio courses encourage students to work “during off-hours” (Brandt, et al. 2013, 331)Brandt, Carol, Katherine Cennamo, Sarah Douglas, Mitzi Vernon, Margarita McGrath, and Yolanda Reimer. 2013. “A theoretical framework for the studio as a learning environment.” International Journal of Technology and Design Education 23: 329-348.. These norms can be viewed in several ways. One is to take them at face value: that Gropius really did intend for students to come and go as they choose and to take their studies causally. But another is that implicit in giving this freedom was a latent argument of how it would be used—that a lack of structured learning times mean that students could focus on the work, rather than the time spent doing the work. The lack of constraint was, perhaps, the point: time should not factor into the pursuit of quality.

Conclusion

When studio is viewed through a lens of time, labor, and presence, power structures become visible as forces that overwhelm and eliminate creativity; studio becomes a way to instill values of work. Studio has unique rhythms that students learn, and as they learn the tempo, they come to understand that being physically present in the studio for long hours is expected and is a sign of becoming a strong, capable designer.

This may be viewed as evidence of the asymmetrical power structures at play, where instructors offer illusions of control to students, but remain in positions where they can demand entirely unrealistic working expectations. However, it may also be viewed as a purposeful pedagogical approach intended to help students realize and benefit from deep immersion in a creative task.

Temporal structuring shapes the way students engage with the world around them, and this structuring is produced and reproduced, continually, to help “guide, orient, and coordinate” ongoing activities. These temporal structures become taken for granted, “serving as powerful templates for the timing and rhythm of members’ social action within the community.” Enacted time is shaped historically, as people “routinely draw on common temporal structures that they (and others) have previously enacted to organize their ongoing practices.” These behaviors are self-reinforcing, and as they are routine, they are often taken for granted. They gain a sense of immutability, which “becomes particularly influential when certain temporal structures become so closely associated with particular social practices… that actors have little awareness of them as socially constituted, or of the possibility of enacting different temporal structures by changing social practices.”

Manifestations of studio time can be altered—they are “human accomplishments” and are “provisional” (Orlikowski and Yates 2002, 687)Orlikowski, Wanda J., and JoAnne Yates. 2002. “It’s about time: temporal structuring in organizations.” Organization Science 13: 684–700. doi:10.1287/orsc.13.6.684.501.. Yet while they are malleable, they are embedded, and they may require a meaningful amount of concerted effort to change. One of the first efforts is to decide that a change is necessary; when studio is viewed through a lens of chronopolitics, the time politics at play in studio are challenged, provoking instructors to question if their pedagogy is enacting the types of power dynamics they intend. Yet chronopolitics as a lens on studio should also be further questioned when it collides with legitimately sound educational techniques. Instructors, in examining the instruments they use to support learning, may be best served by evaluating the nature of time spent work and the empowerment structures beneath these expectations; there is meaningful benefit in long periods of time spent in studio, and simply abandoning existing practices in the threat of an asymmetrical power dynamic may prove shortsighted and reactive.

Notes, limitations, and future research directions

All participants in this study attend design classes 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 students involved are 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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