The Importance of Design Studio Instruction : Tom Mitchell's Design Blog

Friday, January 26, 2007

The Importance of Design Studio Instruction

Traditionally the design studio has played an important role in the development of generations of designers – in architecture, interior design, product design, and other fields. Students would spend long hours in the studio setting which became a home away from home for many. Comfortable chairs, cots, and refrigerators are regular features of design studios. In such settings, students worked in a “guild like” way under the direction of an instructor (“master”) who conveyed his or her experience in a practical way. Design students learned by doing – and they often gained as much through interaction between students as their projects evolved as they did from their instructor.The value of this form of education was highlighted after the move to computer-aided designing. Whereas before students worked in a collaborative way through physical models and sketches – evolving a design – when CAD began being used as a design tool the design development process was often “shut down.” Students arrived at designs individually, in their heads, and jumped straight to the design documentation phase. The result? Designs devoid of richness and development. Such designs, further, often reflected a lack of an understanding of the process of interaction and use. In other words, with CAD as a design tool you get nothing of quality, precisely.From this experience – shared in many design fields – the importance of collaboration, making the design process explicit, evolving design through a series of visualization techniques, and testing it through prototypes before commiting to design documentation is clearly demonstrated. Further, this experience suggests that other fields that may not yet have a studio culture, such as Human Computer Interaction Design, might benefit from adopting the studio approach as the method of attaining the richest, most responsive results. Even immaterial experience can be embedded in forms that act as catalysts to interaction. The design studio – viewed this way – is an essential context for the future of all forms of design, not simply a relic of history.
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