Title: The On-line Studio: Cultures, Perceptions and Strategies for the Future
Project on-going in collaboration with: Dr. Ainslie Murray and Joshua Sleight
Introduction
This project aims to investigate the impact of transitioning to online design studios in architectural education brought on by restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic at UNSW. The study will focus on how studio culture has changed with this transition and if the perceptions that students and staff have of online design studios have shifted.
Theoretical Background
Historically in architecture, it has been broadly felt that face-to-face teaching is an essential component of the design studio, which in turn is the basis for architectural education.
The pedagogy of design studios has been extensively studied, most notably in the last thirty-five years. The influential writings of Donald Schön established the importance of “reflection in action”, a tacit knowledge transmitted from teacher to student that can only occur in a studio environment (Schön, 1985). Later studies explored the idea of the “hidden curriculum” in relation to the design studio (Dutton, 1987; Ward, 1990). Aspects such as social relationships between students themselves as well as teachers, ideologies, values, norms and rituals all work to form a “studio culture” that may be as important to learning as the explicit approach that is taken in education.
Some publications identified this pattern of socialisation and culture to criticise the design studio as favouring certain demographics of student (Stevens, 1995; Groat and Ahrentzen, 1996) and negatively impacting others (Dutton et al., 2002; Webster, 2005). Hence, reassessments of pedagogical conventions were proposed. Other more recent publications have returned to the significance of social interaction and communication by surveying, observing and interviewing students to explore perceptions of their own learning experiences (Lueth, 2008) and how studio culture impacts innovation, (Sidawi, 2012) collaboration (Vyas, Veer and Nijholt, 2013) and progress (Ashton and Durling, 2015) in design. Meyer and Norman (2020) have argued how studios still relying on past pedagogies no longer align with the real world complexities of design and proposed a way forward to give the design studio greater relevance to contemporary experience.
While all of these studies were conducted with face-to-face studios as the focus, they establish and describe the culture that has formed over time, which will need to either be replicated or built upon by online studios. Although their wide-spread use has been forced upon architectural education by the recent limitations of the COVID-19 epidemic, online design studios are certainly not a new development. Correspondingly, there is already an existing body of research on their use.
Initially, the focus was on the technologies available to facilitate online design studios (Andia, 2001; Bender and Vredevoogd, 2006). The majority of more recent studies have been evaluations of individual online design studios across different disciplines (Gorge, 2018; Newman et al., 2018, Abbasi et al., 2018; Jones, Lotz and Holden, 2020). These showed various levels of success, as did others which were focused on hybrid studios (Hill, 2017; Steinø and Khalid, 2017, Kocaturk, 2017; Rodriguez, Hudson and Niblock, 2018).
Several studies have unpacked the pedagogical potential of online design studios, but only doing so either by reviewing existing studies (Kvan, 2001; Crowther, 2013; Masdéu and Fuses, 2017; Salman et al., 2017; Dreamson, 2020) or other qualitative techniques (Griffen, 2015). Other studies have focused on the importance of transferring the qualities of communication, socialisation and engagement that define studio culture in to the online world but only evaluated the success of a small sample of studios (Lotz, Jones and Holden, 2015; Rodriguez, Hudson and Niblock, 2017; Wragg, 2019) . Several studies have explored both staff (George, 2017) and student (Fleischmann, 2018) perceptions of the potential for online design studios, but only doing so prior to the participants' experience of their use.
The most extensive study of online design studios to date has been the recent University of Bath survey, which sampled 29 UK universities to collect both student and staff experiences of the transition to online studios following COVID-19 restrictions (Grover and Wright, 2020). Although only initial results have been published, they show quantitatively and qualitatively a decrease in satisfaction with the studio experience. While some of the findings focus on changed satisfaction with communication, relationships and engagement, there is not a connection between this and the tools and structures required to increase these aspects of studio culture. Similarly, although the study clearly shows perceptions of online studios are poor, there is no comparison to previous perceptions to allow for tracking of how these views have changed once students and staff participate in a online studio.
At UNSW Architecture, following the COVID-19 epidemic we have used a range of different platforms, strategies and pedagogies to deliver online studios. These have included combinations of Zoom with Conceptboard in undergraduate and Microsoft Teams with Mira in the postgraduate degrees. This offers the opportunity for an expansive study across multiple different online studios. This research will be significant because it will quantitatively and qualitatively uncover what aspects of face-to-face studio culture have been transferred across to online studios, identifying which tools and structures were most successful from a student and staff perspective. In doing so, it will also quantitatively identify the change in student and staff perceptions of online design studios after their wide-scale adoption in architectural education. Both of these aspects will lead to recommendations for the future use of online design studios.
Aims
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What has been the impact on studio culture and engagement?
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What kind of studio culture emerges on-line?
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How have the tools and structures of the on-line studio affected communication between students, and between students and staff?
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How have student and tutor perceptions of online design studios changed after experiencing them?
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What will design studio teaching look like in the future as a result of changed perceptions?
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What are the emergent strategies for the communication of complex design scenarios?
This will all inform future design studios at UNSW, allowing for the improvement of on-line design studios moving into 2021 and beyond.
Progress / Outcomes / Next steps
The project is currently going through ethics, with the aim to complete in early-to-mid 2021
