'Chronopolitics: The role of time in design studio education' reviews: Reject and Resubmit

Reviewer 1

For the purpose of structure and clarity, I will be using headings and numerical system that is commonly used by other journals. I hope this is useful for the author(s).

1. Thematic Focus and Empirical Grounding — 4/5

• This is a timely and potentially valuable topic, particularly the examination of how instructors and students differently understand time, labor, and presence in the design studio.
• The juxtaposition of instructor and student perspectives is a particular strength and gives the paper a useful empirical foundation.
• The manuscript would benefit from sharpening its central scholarly contribution: What, specifically, does a chronopolitical analysis reveal about design studio education that existing research on studio culture, labor, or pedagogy does not?
• The authors should also be careful to distinguish between what the discourse data demonstrate and the authors' subsequent theoretical interpretations of those data.

2. Conceptual Model — 4/5

• The distinction between clock time and task time is compelling and provides a productive conceptual lens for examining studio education.
• At times, however, the manuscript appears to position power and temporal control primarily as problematic. Not all power dynamics in education are necessarily negative, particularly during students' early development. Students often benefit from appropriately structured relationships in which instructors establish expectations, provide direction, and help students develop new ways of thinking and working.
• In this regard, the authors may benefit from considering William Perry's model of intellectual development, particularly the "Dualism" phase, in which students may initially benefit from clear authority, structure, and distinctions between right and wrong before developing greater intellectual independence. Exploring this literature could add important nuance to the manuscript's discussion of power, authority, and student development.
• More broadly, the manuscript should clarify when temporal structures constitute problematic forms of control and when they may represent intentional and developmentally appropriate pedagogy.

3. Explanatory Logic — 4/5

• The manuscript's apparent tension between viewing extended studio time as oppressive and viewing it as potentially productive is actually one of its most interesting aspects. The authors should make this distinction more explicit rather than allowing the reader to infer it.
• Similarly, the discussion would be strengthened by greater attention to student development. Effective pedagogy depends in part on understanding who students are developmentally and culturally. This may be particularly important for today's students, including younger post-COVID cohorts of Generation Z, whose experiences and characteristics may have implications for how they understand authority, work, feedback, collaboration, and educational expectations.
• I encourage the authors to consider the work of Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, as well as Steven Faerm's Introduction to Design Education, as potentially useful literature for framing this issue. Or, at minimum, the importance of student-development research could be identified in the manuscript's future research directions.

4. Implications and Applications — 3.5/5

• The manuscript raises important questions for studio pedagogy, but the practical implications are unclear and could be more fully developed.
• In particular, I would encourage the authors to consider that clock time is not necessarily only a negative construct. A significant benefit of formal time requirements in design education is that they can mirror the organizational structures of professional design practice. Design firms and professional studios operate within schedules, deadlines, billable hours, project timelines, and other temporal constraints.
• Consequently, incorporating some of these formal temporal expectations into education may provide students with a more fluid transition from school into professional studio environments. For this reviewer, preparing students for successful professional practice is an essential consideration that deserves greater attention in the manuscript.
• The authors might therefore distinguish between temporal practices that unnecessarily reward mere presence or endurance and those that intentionally develop students' capacity to work productively within the temporal structures of professional practice.
• The paper could conclude with several concrete pedagogical recommendations—for example, making the purpose of extended studio time explicit, distinguishing required contact time from recommended independent work time, and evaluating the quality and outcomes of work rather than simply the number of hours spent in the studio. Additionally, asking students to engage in written reflection regarding the topic and classroom experience as it relates to the topic, and then sharing peer-to-peer or some other format (named or anonymous).

5. Quality of Communication — 4/5

• The manuscript is generally well written, coherent, and engaging, and the topic should be of interest to readers of The Design Journal.
• Several rhetorically strong claims would benefit from qualification and/or clearer grounding in the data. Terms such as "abusive" and descriptions of students as effectively "selling" their time risk moving beyond what the empirical evidence can establish.
• Overall, the manuscript would be strengthened by sharpening its terminology, qualifying its strongest claims, and more clearly distinguishing empirical findings from theoretical interpretation.

Overall Assessment

This is a thought-provoking and potentially significant contribution to scholarship on design studio education. Its strongest contribution lies in bringing temporal experience, labor, and power into conversation through the perspectives of both instructors and students. I recommend minor revision. The manuscript would be substantially strengthened by developing a more nuanced account of power and authority, incorporating student-development perspectives, and recognizing that temporal structures—including clock time—can serve not only disciplinary functions but also legitimate pedagogical and professional-development purposes.

Recommendation: Minor Revision / Revise and Resubmit

Reviewer 2

This paper analyzes studio education from the perspective of time, examining how instructors and students understand the relationship between teaching, learning, and the time spent in studio courses. The authors collected data through interviews with instructors and students, as well as short videos produced by students. The discussion focuses particularly on differences between students’ and instructors’ perceptions of time and considers how their respective understandings of clock time and task time contribute to these differences.

The paper addresses an intriguing and potentially valuable area of research. Based on the information presented in the “Study Design” section, the researchers collected data from a relatively substantial body of participants. However, the depth and rigor suggested by the study design are not consistently reflected in the analysis and discussion. This raises several significant concerns, which I outline below under four headings.

1. Large and overgeneralized claims

The most concerning aspect of the paper is its tendency to make broad and generalized claims without adequately supporting them through empirical evidence or prior literature.

Early in the paper, these claims concern the temporal distinctiveness of studio education and the relationship between time spent in the studio and student success. For example, from its opening pages, the paper positions design education as distinct from other fields because of the amount of time it requires, stating that “spending more time in studio leads to becoming a better designer” (p. 2). Such claims require much stronger empirical and theoretical support. Studio-format courses are not unique to design disciplines, and disciplines that rely heavily on laboratories, clinical environments, or other forms of experiential learning (for example, medicine) make similar demands on students’ time.

Similar problems appear in the discussion section, where the authors make assertions without clearly demonstrating how they are supported by the data. For example, the authors write: “Providing students dedicated spaces and comfortable amenities serves as emotional leverage, a carrot rather than a stick” (p. 13). However, the paper provides little evidence that institutions broadly provide students with dedicated studio spaces or particularly comfortable amenities. My own experience would suggest that this is far from the case. More importantly, the study does not appear to present data concerning students’ perceptions of studio space in terms of ownership, attachment, comfort, or amenities that would substantiate this particular interpretation.

Another example, the authors state that “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” (p. 15). Again, it is unclear which findings support this conclusion or how widely such a claim can reasonably be generalized from the study.

2. A missed opportunity resulting from limited reliance on the data

The shortcoming discussed above appear to result primarily from two issues: first, the paper does not sufficiently engage prior literature to support some of its broader arguments; second, and more importantly, it does not make adequate use of the data it had collected to develop its arguments and discussion. I am particularly concerned about the latter because it prevents the study from realizing its potential contribution to the literature.

In the Study Design section, the authors clearly describe their data collection and analysis procedures. Overall, the approach to data collection appears rigorous, although there is an imbalance between instructor and student participation; the number of instructors who participated in the study is almost twice the number of students.

This imbalance, however, is not my primary concern. The more significant problem is that the discussion has only a limited connection to the findings. At times, the discussion reads almost as a separate conceptual paper, relying primarily on logical argumentation rather than on the results of the qualitative study. The authors also introduce additional literature in the discussion - work that is not meaningfully addressed in the literature review - and use this literature to develop several of their central claims rather than grounding those claims in their own data.

This problem is compounded by the relative shallowness of the findings section, which provides limited new information about the topic. As a result, many parts of the discussion come across as subjective or speculative rather than as interpretations emerging from the empirical material.

The authors appear to have collected a potentially rich dataset. A stronger paper would make much more extensive use of participant quotations, contrasts between instructor and student perspectives, and systematic patterns emerging from the interviews and videos. These data should drive the central arguments of the discussion.

3. The distinction between studio time and project time is ambiguous

The core focus of the paper remains somewhat unclear because an important distinction needs to be made between time spent physically in the studio and time spent working on a project. The paper oscillates between these two, making it difficult to determine which constitutes the primary object of analysis.

The authors do not adequately define what they mean by “studio time,” even though this phrase appears in the research questions on page 4. It is also unclear how this concept was communicated to participants during data collection. Participants could easily have interpreted questions about “studio time” differently or had difficulty conceptually separating time physically spent in the studio from time spent working on studio projects elsewhere.

This ambiguity has important methodological implications. If participants interpreted “studio time” differently, this could have affected the consistency and validity of the data. The authors do not explain what measures, if any, were taken to ensure that participants understood the term in a comparable way.

Indeed, some of the findings (particularly those concerning faculty perspectives) give the impression that participants may actually have been discussing the amount of time students spend working on projects rather than the amount of time they spend physically present in the studio. This raises significant questions about precisely what phenomenon the study is measuring.

4. Limited contribution of new knowledge

While examining differences between instructors’ and students’ perceptions of time is a worthwhile and potentially important line of inquiry, the paper in its current form offers relatively limited new knowledge on this topic.

I believe this limitation largely results from the three concerns outlined above. The paper makes several broad claims that are not sufficiently substantiated, does not fully capitalize on the richness of its qualitative data, and leaves its central construct—studio time—insufficiently defined. Together, these problems make it difficult to identify the specific empirical or theoretical contribution of the study.

A side note

Although the authors already cite another work by Jones, I also strongly recommend that they consult Studio Properties: A Field Guide to Design Education by Jones et al. (2025). This book is directly relevant to the issues the paper examines.