The Remote Studio: Learning Communities in the Age of Pandemic
Every spring I teach a design studio in the School of Engineering at Brown. The class is a project-based studio course where students learn to translate their ideas into physical objects through iterative prototyping, critique, and the development and documentation of their creative process. Working with one’s hands, mind, and peers are essential elements of the class. We develop our projects within the frameworks of various design strategies, from which students are encouraged to cultivate their own creative process. These strategies include, but are not limited to, Human Centered Design, Design Fiction, Speculative Design, and Critical Design, spanning projects that range from designing with microcontrollers to prototyping full-scale plywood furniture.
However, this semester due to social distancing for COVID-19, it became clear that there would be no full-scale furniture prototypes. There wouldn’t be any all-nighters in the studio with peers. There wouldn’t be any in-person critiques. We hurriedly shifted to remote learning in late March, just before leaving for spring break, and “returned” to a changed world; a world viewed from inside our homes and through our screens.
On the first day back, our class candidly discussed — now over Zoom — the challenges we faced. I conveyed my own uncertainty and anxiety about the shape the semester would take, and invited the class to share theirs. But out of these conversations we discovered opportunities to innovate. We began to realize that we could approach the situation as a design problem. It became clear, with a bit of disappointment, that our intention to build furniture for our final project was not going to be possible, but by shifting to a public health focus, we could design for the new reality we all found ourselves in together. We discovered possibilities worth exploring that we hadn’t even considered before.
Face masks, which have since become the iconic design object of the moment, were an early topic of conversation, as were changing norms about personal, public, virtual, and physical spaces. All these conversations helped us not only deal with the uncertainty and anxiety of the situation, but in the end, provided a ripe opportunity to reframe these anxieties into specific, concrete design questions that we could prototype around.
The students rose to the challenge, as they usually do. By the end of the semester, several impressive design interventions were being developed in our class. The Social Distancing Kit, which was prototyped with both physical and virtual elements, not only gives users everything one needs to stay healthy in public spaces, but also promotes an important conversation about the need for social distancing. Other groups explored ways to deal with isolation, and more generally, the mental health effects of reducing contact with friends and family.
Now that the semester has concluded, we turn towards the uncertainty of the fall, and ask how those of us teaching studio classes might learn from the past semester and apply these lessons to next semester, whatever shape that may take. As universities struggle to balance safety with pedagogy, it is becoming increasingly clear that those of us who teach studio courses will have to fundamentally adapt the way we teach in any scenario.
A Class is more than a Classroom
Studio classes are not easily translated online. Working collaboratively with physical materials in studios and labs is an essential part of the transformative learning experience we try to deliver. But a class is far more than a classroom. It’s a community, and by expanding that community beyond the conventions of the classroom, lab, and studio, we can give students an opportunity to radically rethink what the university is, and how it delivers on its educational mission. A shift to remote learning this fall, in part or whole, doesn’t necessarily need to sacrifice the quality of the experience, but it will require more creativity and flexibility in how that experience is delivered. It will also require more collaboration between students and teachers.
As online learning is being dusted off and hastily adapted to the needs of the quarantine, it is worth remembering the optimism online learning once enjoyed. It has — and I believe still has — the promise of making learning more accessible, even when physical proximity is not possible. It has the potential to reshape the university.
Massive Open Online Classes are often blamed for dampening the early optimism for online learning. Any class with a completion of rate below 10% would rightly be cause for concern in the traditional paradigm. MOOCs may look like failures when compared to a conventional classroom, but perhaps this isn’t the best comparison anymore, as the demand to develop new approaches to studio based pedagogy become increasingly urgent. We need pedagogical tools that are flexible enough to adapt to this unprecedented situation, and there are profitable lessons to learn from MOOCs.
One of the great drawbacks of MOOCs is their inability to effectively create class cohesion, and cultivate the kind of deep relationships between teacher and student, and student and student, that are essential for creative collaboration. An important missing element of MOOCs is the lack of community they engender. Building upon early iterations of online learning, we should be experimenting (i.e. prototyping) more with different kinds of educational modalities, even approaches that are smaller, less open, and blended than approaches that are massive, open, and exclusively online. We should be giving as much thought about cultivating community as we are about the content we are trying to deliver.
One such experimental class, which we developed in those early optimistic years of online learning, was STEAMstudio. Like DesignStudio, STEAMstudio was a project based design studio course that introduced students to STEAM principles (Science, Technology, Engineering, ART, and Math). Our intention was to radically rethink these kinds of studio classes in light of the new tools at our disposal, and to eschew some of the more common liabilities of MOOCs. The course was designed collaboratively between undergrads in the Brown/RISD STEAM club and faculty, and delivered to high school students through the Summer@Brown program, some of whom were remote asynchronous learners, and some of whom were local synchronous learners. All the students, remote and local, synchronous and asynchronous, not only finished the course with a design portfolio and a critical approach to cultivating their creative process, but with a social media based community that outlasted the course itself by many years. It taught us that rather than diminishing a collaborative sense of community, remote learning can enhance it.
We acknowledged from the beginning that the remote, asynchronous experience would be different from, but informed by, the synchronous local learners on campus. We also acknowledged that there would be different constraints in regard to the prototypes we would be making. So, we adopted a blended approach to iterative prototyping, sometimes making physical artifacts (e.g. cardboard models, 3D prints, etc.), and sometimes making virtual prototypes (e.g. websites, apps, etc.). We documented our work and built community through the same social media networks the students were already using, including Facebook and Tumblr. The latter would later serve as the foundation for the students’ portfolios. By acknowledging the differences between remote learning and local learning, discussing these constraints as part of the creative process, and building flexibility into how we delivered content, it freed us to explore new modalities in ways we had not imagined before.
As important as building community in the virtual classroom and studio is to keeping students engaged, equally important is building community between educators. Working with colleagues at peer intuitions, and inspired by Beth Altringer’s design course at Harvard, we are launching the Nested Learning Collaborative. Our goal is to build a community of educators who teach similar studio courses, and to develop better resources for the remote studio courses we will be teaching in the fall. We invite you to join the conversation.
As we look to the fall, there is still a great deal of uncertainty. New challenges will certainly emerge as the situation evolves. But design, both as a practice and as pedagogy, is well suited to creative problem solving, and we have precedent to build upon. But perhaps most importantly, we have our communities to lean into, which arguably, have never been stronger.
