If you are a design student or educator, chances are that you have experience of and perhaps some strong views about the design studio. The design studio is a place that gives opportunities to students (and tutors) to co-exist: to interact, ask questions, work together, or work side-by-side, and learn from one another: either directly through mentoring or collaboration, or indirectly through simply being in that place and observing others. A design studio can be physical, digital, or a mixture of the two. At the Open University, we use a digital platform/gallery space for students to share their work in progress and comment on each others’ posts, called ODS. But we also have tutorial spaces and events, where students can ask questions, work on small tasks together, and engage in discussions about their projects or broader design issues.
Other colleagues have written about the design studio in this blog, for example, Nic Lotz has written about the Inclusive Design Studio and together with Derek Jones she has been working on an open-access publication called Studio Properties.
In the past few years, we have been offering an extra-curricular opportunity to students to engage in small projects or challenges defined by external partners (or clients). This in a way extends the design studio beyond the classroom, opening up routes for embedding learning in the real world, as well as developing professional design experience and skills.
Vera Hale with a group of colleagues has helped organise two Designathons with charity The Glass-House Community Led Design. These were organised as full-day events, where students worked on a brief to support the charity’s mission to champion design quality and to connect and empower people to design their places. The Glass-House is a long-standing strategic partner of OU Design and has collaborated in research, teaching and knowledge exchange initiatives with us, engaging a broad variety of people. Students had an opportunity to learn from their approach and experience of working with different organisations up and down the country, as well as contribute to their work and practice.
This year we are experimenting with a different format for the Designathon. We signed up to the annual competition run by Engineers without Borders focussed on Engineering for People. This year’s brief was defined in collaboration with Makers Valley Partnership in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Engineers without Borders describe the benefits of this competition:
“Aligned with UNESCO’s call for greater complexity in engineering education, the Design Challenge uses project-based learning to immerse students in real-world contexts within a safe environment. Students work collaboratively to propose sustainable solutions addressing engineering issues within a specific geographic context, enabling them to develop crucial skills, including collaborative problem-solving, ethical decision-making, cultural sensitivity, and community engagement.”
As part of their offer, Engineers without Borders also include access to a space on the Discord social network platform, where students can ask questions to the Makers Valley partnership team to help understand the context. Forums like that can be thought to be part of the design studio, allowing students to interact with the client and see what topics other groups engage with.
For our OU students, we also use other spaces and processes to create the studio space. We have shared spaces on Miro whiteboard, which the teams use to brainstorm, present and discuss their findings and design concepts. We also have shared spaces where they can drop and save relevant materials (reports, papers, images) and of course a regular meeting space, where we collectively (students and tutors) explore different questions and ideas and review the teams’ progress. Students also use their own tools and platforms to communicate and work together.
The teams are in the process of developing their submissions for their competition entries. They have done some amazing work so far and I hope that they will able to share their projects in this blog once the competition is over. Whatever the outcome, I hope this will be a valuable experience for them.
I consider that the combination of design studio and project-based learning is an important aspect of design learning and training, and I hope we will be able to find creative and useful ways to embed this in our new Bachelor of Design.
Leave a Reply