[Archive] Talking Design Studio Pedagogy with Alice Hellard and Derek Jones

Recommended read: 

Studio Properties: A field guide to design education (edited by Derek Jones ,  Elizabeth Boling,  James Benedict Brown ,  James Corazzo,  Colin M. Gray,  Nicole Lotz)

Derek Jones and Alice Hellard explore the concept of design studio as a transformative educational approach that extends beyond physical space to encompass social dynamics, extended cognition, and embodied knowledge.

• Design studio is not just a physical space but a collection of practices involving social interaction, extended cognition, and listening in
• Virtual design studios reveal important insights about how students learn through observation and "legitimate peripheral learning" 
• The process of enculturation into design practices requires students to develop confidence in the language and methods of design
• Studio practice allows students to externalize thinking through models and drawings as part of the cognitive process
• Current assessment frameworks often fail to recognize or value the types of knowledge central to design practice
• Implementing aspects of studio practice in secondary schools faces challenges but offers opportunities for more authentic design education
• Students need opportunities to design without predetermined outcomes, though this creates tensions with traditional assessment models

If you want to support the podcast financially, you can become a patron. Links to SpeakPipe, Patreon and my website are in the show notes.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to archived episode
• 1:34 Meeting Alice and Derek
• 4:35 Defining design studio concept
• 11:21 Virtual vs physical studio spaces
• 19:15 Cognition and design thinking
• 31:00 Knowledge in design education
• 46:37 Takeaways and future conversations
• 55:07 Podcast closing

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

This is one of the episodes that I've pulled out for the summer from my archive of episodes. I've picked these because they're a longer play and I'm thinking that maybe you've got time to do some more relaxed listening over the summer. This episode from the archive is with Alice Hellard and Derek Jones, and they're talking about the concept of design studio, which is something that I was really unfamiliar with when I started talking with the pair of them. They didn't know each other before this episode and they are two of the most intelligent people I know and one of the challenges I had as the host was trying to keep them on track, because they would spin off each other in their conversations and they gave me a new insight into this concept of Design Studio. Derek has just had a book published earlier this year about design studio and I'll put a link to that one in the show notes, but I hope you enjoy this conversation and maybe your brain will hurt as much as mine did On with the episode Today. It's another episode in the Shaping D&T series and, a bit like some of the ones I've done more recently, we're sort of taking a slightly different angle on this one, because I think there's something that's really significant about pedagogy and space and our approaches that we take within the subject. That can influence and shape what happens in the classroom and then possibly what might influence beyond the classroom for design and technology. So I've got two people who are interested in this particular aspect. We're going to talk about Design Studio this morning.

Speaker 1: 1:26

This is a podcast episode that I've been trying to get set up, I think probably for a good year. We finally managed it this morning. I've got two people here who are really just got a wonderful, different way of thinking, so I'm expecting that I'm going to have my head blown off this morning. Um, keeping up with their conversation, they're both pulling faces, um, to kind of put themselves sort of in the shade, but actually they're real two giants in the way they think about design and design and technology, um, and the way they challenge what we're doing in the subject, but also, um, one person's coming from a different perspective in terms of thinking about in higher education and design practice in its wider sense. So, given all that build-up, don't disappoint you two. No, you won't. You won't. You've not done before. They've both been on the podcast. I'm going to start first of all with you, alice. Would you like to give a quick overview about who you are, where you are and what you do?

Speaker 2: 2:23

Hi, yes, I'm Alice Hellard. I am the Programme Lead for Design and Technology, pgce at Goldsmiths University of London, but formerly was a design and technology teacher and I worked in a couple of London secondary schools and the second one I was the Head of Department. So my interest in this conversation about the design studio is actually not I'm not coming from it from the position of knowing a lot about the sort of the theory behind design studios. I'm really coming at this conversation from my positioning as a teacher and, you know, thinking about kind of, yeah, really concretely, what that might look like, can look like, could look like in school great.

Speaker 1: 3:09

Thank you very much, yeah, and that's great to have your perspective on that. And then Derek would like to say give a little bit of overview about who you are and what you are and what you do.

Speaker 3: 3:18

I'll try to do that and not let you down, obviously as well no, pressure very important.

Speaker 3: 3:23

No pressure, absolutely so. My name is Derek Jones and I'm a senior lecturer in sustainable design at the Open University. At the Open University, we teach design at a distance, so you know we teach adults in online settings. We're not present. We don't have physical studios, if you like like. So we teach it in a very, very different way, and that means you have to approach it differently. My background is also as a practitioner. I'm actually an architect. I've had 10, maybe 15 years of practice experience as well, so I guess I come to this as a practitioner first and then a kind of academic second, although I really strongly believe that the two could go together a lot better and a lot healthier. Um. So yeah, I'm particularly interested in studio. Um, and how studio works and why. Um. So yeah, that's where I'm coming from thank you very much.

Speaker 1: 4:14

Well, you haven't disappointed either of you so far, but we're only about three minutes in so just building you up. So, yes, this, this conversation around design studio. So it's been hinted out there. So, derek, I'm going to come back to you. Can you give us a bit of an overview about what, what it means?

Speaker 3: 4:35

that's a good question and I guess that's the question I started with um. As I said, I moved from practice into academia and at one point you know the conversation about do you fancy doing a PhD? Comes up. You know, do you formalize this knowledge in some kind of way? Now you've got a different pressure on you. I guess, as a practitioner, you know you don't have to do it necessarily for academic reasons or for, you know, promotion reasons, because you've already got a bit of a career behind you.

Speaker 3: 5:04

So I was fortunate enough that I was able to approach it, I guess, as a something I could kind of find that I wanted to do. So I decided to do something on studio. We, as I say, we teach design at a distance at the Open University and I really wanted to know how does this work? Is it a studio? Are there differences, similarities, is there something we could say about online that might be referred to in proximate space or physical studios and vice versa, because I was also very interested in physical architecture and virtual architecture at the time, believe it or not, and the two things actually are related in a kind of weird and interesting way. Anyway, bottom line is decided to do the PhD on it, went to the library expecting to find the book on studio so I could do the comparison and there wasn't one. There was a whole bunch of stuff, there was a whole bunch of information, but nobody had kind of brought it together. And then you realize there's a good reason for that. You know, studio is a big thing. It's not necessarily a singular practice. It's certainly not an easy thing, if you like, or a simple thing to communicate, but you know, an easy thing, if you like, or a simple thing to communicate. But yeah, that paid to the PhD being a simple comparison thing. So instead what I decided to do was try to make sense of it from the perspective of being in a distance studio. So it's almost kind of perverse in a way.

Speaker 3: 6:19

I've learned about design by teaching design at a distance, because you kind of have to make it visible, you have to do certain things that stop you waffling about it and I'm very conscious of the fact I need to stop waffling very soon. But you have to be very clear about what it is that you're doing. So you can't just say, well, I just dot, dot, dot, or you just sit there until an idea comes. You have to give direction. You have to be quite explicit about things but still retain that kind of like uncertainty and that implicitness at the same time. It's quite an interesting challenge. So that's what allowed me to look at studio, I guess, in a different way, and so we've started this new studio properties project with a view to bringing together some of these kind of like ideas and findings. Maybe talk a bit about that a bit later, but yeah, that's a kind of quick potted history, I guess, of where I come from with studio is that enough.

Speaker 1: 7:11

Yeah, well, I'm going to ask you a little bit more on Alice. Feel free to chip in. So when you say studio, so somebody like me might think of a physical space. Is it a space, or is it a way of thinking and doing design?

Speaker 3: 7:30

So, yes, originally I started thinking the obvious thing, which is that it is a physical space, it might have non-physical components to it. You know, the social structures, the cultural structures, all of the other stuff that goes around it. Incredibly important, but maybe the physical thing was the catalyst. And even in an online space, when we saw online behaviors that were similar but not quite the same as physical spaces, that was an indicator that things might not be as straightforward as it's just the physical space. But these other things that happen in the physical space are actually as important, if not more important. So I guess the longer I've been involved in this and the more we've discovered different properties of studio, the more I would say it moves away from that traditional view of it just being a room. Um, there's lots of other stuff that it could be and I think those would be the interesting things to explore in terms of, well, where might else those propagate? Where else might they be?

Speaker 3: 8:25

So, for example, peter Lloyd did an interesting podcast last week talking about social constructivist design education. So that's design education where it really depends on the people that you're working with to construct what it is that you believe design is, and for him he would describe Parliament as being a studio. God help us all. Where we agree to do certain things, he would describe those as studios simply because that social component, that space where people try to come together to respond to a problem, to do something that sharing, I think, is actually quite an important bit. We'll talk about proximity and that later on.

Speaker 2: 9:05

So would you sort of is it right to sort of summarise studio practice as a sort of collective practice of thinking, doing kind of emerging ideas, that kind of thing? And it's so. It's not just, it's not just the physical space, but it's the set of practices that can take place within that social kind of setting, as it were. And the social is quite crucial to the notion of studio or personally speaking, alice, yeah, I would say so personally.

Speaker 3: 9:43

Um, I don't have any evidence for that as yet and we do need to be careful that we don't then say, therefore, studio is everything you know, because then you do that common thing where, yeah, it's everything, but then that means it's nothing, you know, there's nothing to say. I still do think there is something special about studio inverted commas as a concept, and there's a very few theorists who do actually understand it as a concept and there are very few theorists who do actually understand it as a concept. And it might be worth picking up some of those kind of like signature things, because I think they're the interesting things that might be translated across studio. I do think it is slightly different. I do think it does bear attention because it is different.

Speaker 2: 10:21

And just following up on that, because that was kind of my next question actually do you think is it signature for design? Is it like a signature approach for design specifically, Good question, shulman.

Speaker 3: 10:33

in that famous paper it's cited by thousands and thousands of people. It's not even a paper. It doesn't even have evidence. It was just a kind of idea he came up with and he called it the signature pedagogy. In design, the studio was one of the key signature pedagogies. I guess from one point of view, if you're looking at it, say, from a kind of like habitus point of view, it's something that's sticky, it's something that keeps appearing time and time and time again all throughout lots of different design disciplines, and that stickiness bears attention. You know, it's worth paying attention to that. How it becomes sticky, how it is maintained, is quite interesting. So yeah, I possibly I don't know. I'm going to sit on the fence on whether or not it's a pure signature. I suspect so. I suspect so.

Speaker 2: 11:20

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 11:21

So it's interesting because one of the reasons that I'm really interested in this conversation is because when I was a teacher and a new teacher actually it really sort of bothered me how, um, and really got under my skin how the stuff I was teaching in in school was really quite different to how I'd learned about design in university and in my professional life and we had these kind of, you know, very predetermined, uh sort of outcome focused projects where everybody was kind of making the same thing over you know a period of time.

Speaker 2: 11:53

We all, we all know that kind of design and make assignment model, um, and so I did some reading around this and I and I and I was really struck at the time by this word enculturation, and that, in order to learn the domain of something and the domain of a kind of you know, uh well, the domain of design, my students as, according to to what I've been reading, I felt they needed to be enculturated into the practices of design, which means that they needed to have experiences and the sort of the language of design and sort of be able to observe, and also that they needed instruction, teaching in design, but all of that as a kind of as a set of kind of things that came together.

Speaker 2: 12:39

So so that's what ended up sort of driving my approach to my sort of classroom, if you like. Now I'm not suggesting for a minute that me as a kind of fairly new teacher with my developed, continually trying to develop my practice, I wasn't consciously setting up a sort of studio approach. But I think I relate a lot of what you're saying now to that kind of thinking that I had as a teacher. I really wanted to introduce my students and to encourage them to be confident in the domain of design by giving them those kind of designerly experiences.

Speaker 3: 13:20

Completely and utterly agree. There's two properties from the new book that spring to mind. One is actually it uses the word enculturation. It's actually called eculturation, enculturation and indoctrination.

Speaker 3: 13:32

And believe it or not, that's actually a spectrum. So at the extreme end you have absolute beasting studios. I was brought up in a beasting studio. Well, I started off in a beasting studio and then it moved. Um, there was a big shift at the time, um, and there's a whole bunch of new educators that came in and that basically means that you stand in front of your drawings, you get shouted at and told that's not what to do and you repeat, and repeat, and repeat is that like when the teacher draws on the drawing.

Speaker 3: 14:00

You know that kind of thing yeah, exactly right, absolutely, basically can I just chip in.

Speaker 1: 14:04

What was that word? Beating or beating? I was quite a bit.

Speaker 3: 14:07

I'm sorry, maybe that's a Scottish pedagogical term.

Speaker 1: 14:12

I'm just thinking about this going through transcription and I'm thinking this is going to be interesting. Anyway, sorry, okay brilliant.

Speaker 3: 14:21

At the other end of it you have acculturation, which is where you're trying to bring the students culture into the studio so it can inform the studio itself. But in the middle you have that lovely sweet spot which is where you're trying to actually as you quite rightly say, alice you're trying to give students the language, the confidence. I remember the first time I was taught to fold a drawing as an architect. I know it sounds really stupid and really simple, but in folding that drawing for a second I felt like an architect, I felt like a professional. It's just a little symbol, it's a little trapping of what professionals do.

Speaker 3: 14:56

Studio is a really important simulation. It's a space where you can try out things. More importantly, you can try them out if the right sort of atmosphere is encouraged. You can try them out without fear of reprisal. You can try out these different words, these different ways of doing things. That is also incredibly important. That takes us to some of the more advanced studios where you would hope that by the time you get that level of confidence and you do see this in some secondary schools.

Speaker 3: 15:22

I remember studying six year English and the shift there was when you were suddenly allowed to have an opinion. You were allowed to almost give back, if you like, to the class what it was that you were creating about this piece of literature or this piece of thing, and that's where studios then move into that acculturation. It's almost kind of like a spectrum. But what I would really stress is really difficult to avoid sometimes, because you're in that mode of we need to produce X, y and Z when you dismiss a student's culture and you say that culture is invalid. For example, these drawings look ugly. I hate that music. I don't like this whatever it is. I do not value your culture. You need to replace it with this culture. We've had that for far too long, I think, in design, education, the global northern tradition Excuse me, the global tradition and it still infects us and I'd love to see that challenged.

Speaker 2: 16:17

I couldn't agree more, and a part of that is our sort of within sort of secondary education.

Speaker 2: 16:22

It's changing a bit now, but but this dependence we've had on design history and this sort of the canon of design history being quite you know, through these quite rigidly taught design movements and that kinds of thing, and actually that's that sort of sets out design as as only really having existed post the industrial revolution and and all of that kind of stuff and everything that emerged around mass production really at that point, and globalization, all those kinds of things and obviously design has a much longer history than that. But when our approach is to kind of yeah to all of those things are shaped by quite a narrow kind of understanding of what's right and what's wrong. And you know, dieter Rand's principles of good design and all those kinds of stuff which which I definitely bought into as a new teacher, you know, um oh, yeah and and and then.

Speaker 2: 17:11

The other thing that and I talk to the students at goldsmiths about this sometimes is is that when we um google, you know, for images and things on google, we've got an echo chamber because our algorithm is determining what we see, you know, and I definitely sort of fell prey to that as a teacher oh look, this is really good design. Actually, students in my classes were not interested in what I thought was good design. That was actually irrelevant to them. There's a bit of a digression, though, isn't it Away from the focus of studio already?

Speaker 3: 17:45

No, I think it's an important one. Sorry, alison, tell us to stop talking if you wanted to interrupt, but I think it is an important point. No, studio is not just what one person does with the tools round about them, although that's a really interesting thing. It's not just what two people do collectively. It's not just what three people do or a group do and say this is what it is. There is a social, then a cultural, then.

Speaker 3: 18:10

All of these other different dimensions do inform studio and studio needs to push back on that as well, and I think you're absolutely right. I think when you force a canon on students, you're telling them what is right and what is wrong, and that is not what we need in designers and where we are in the world just now. We do need people capable of forming and creating their own judgment and actually saying no, this is good because dot, dot, dot, rather than this is good because I was told it was. Um, yeah, that's maybe a wider issue in education systems throughout the world, not just the UK, by the way. So, yeah, I do think it is an important point, like what it is, and who gets to to take part in this and that kind of goes back a bit then to this, to to the what really of studio practice what does?

Speaker 2: 19:02

it? What does it look like for you, derek, when you know when the studio is sort of happening? Because I've got my idea of what I think you mean, but I'd be if can you sort of just, I suppose, uh, go into it in a bit more detail.

Speaker 3: 19:18

I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll maybe. I'll maybe talk just a little tiny bit about the studio at the Open University, because it is slightly different. It's an online studio. I think most of us have a bit of a notion of what the physical studio is, although maybe it is actually worth looking back at that as well. Anyway, for me, what was really interesting about when we started using a virtual studio in the Open University was just how popular it was.

Speaker 3: 19:47

I think this was back when web 2.0 was coming in. That was the big buzzword back then. So things like Instagram, sharing images, facebook, was becoming popular. There was already starting to build a bit of a language of engaging with digital media to engage in social behaviours, and that is one of the primary things that you do in studio. The social component in studio is actually way more important than anybody realises, particularly in an education studio where traditionally you are sharing the same space. That kind of sideways looking at other students is actually really important. Lave and Wenger call it legitimate peripheral learning, which is a fancy term for basically just taking in what's happening in the studio.

Speaker 2: 20:32

Is that another way of saying getting ideas from other sources? You know?

Speaker 3: 20:36

That too, yeah, but not just that. It's also like hearing how somebody pronounces a word or watching how somebody reacts when they get beastied in a studio. I'm gonna use the word again there. I'll stop it out with something, if you want. No, no, it's fine.

Speaker 1: 20:51

I just, I think it was the accent, I think I was more probably is.

Speaker 3: 20:54

Yeah, I can't wait. It'll be like breakfast or something like that, won't it? Um, yeah, so it's not as straightforward as just saying I look at other students work and I compare it. That's one of them, and one of the properties we have is social comparison. It's what's called listening in in the studio. That's the common term for legitimate peripheral learning and you're taking in far more.

Speaker 3: 21:15

And what we found in our virtual studio was that students who listen in and our equivalent of that was basically just students looking at other students work in the virtual studio. This was one of the biggest behaviors that students were engaging in. They weren't doing what we thought or we wanted them to do as educators, which was, you know, look at other students work, comment on them, have a nice design dialogue and you know everything's perfect. That wasn't what was happening. Students were just looking, they were just watching, they were just being in studio, I would say in a virtual space. And that was the single biggest predictor of student success was whether or not you engaged in those spaces, particularly early in the module.

Speaker 3: 21:53

And this is entirely virtual. You're not looking at people, you're looking at people through their work. You're actually seeing design identities through people's work. So that, to me, was an indicator that we can see this in a digital studio. There's an analogue to what's happening in the physical studio, but it helps us actually see what the detail of what is happening in the physical studio and it would be nice to do that, if you like, in the physical studio and ask what's actually happening there that we might actually take back into the virtual studio. So yeah, I guess that'll be one thing that I might hint at. I guess what is a studio from a virtual perspective?

Speaker 2: 22:31

anyway, and in the studio, in the virtual studio, what are designers doing? What does the practice kind of look like? Are they talking and, you know, doing those kind of designerly things like modelling ideas and stuff like that? Yeah, what does it look like?

Speaker 3: 22:56

Yeah, most of it, all of that stuff, but I guess what you would say they are doing is getting something from that work that you've just described and then representing it. So it's always. It's still a transaction in an online studio. You're still seeing, if you like not the final result. It might be an interim result, but that's still an artifact. It's still a thing, if you like, that you're sharing. What there's less of is the kind of nuanced detail that what are you doing right now, or what are the things round about you in order to get to that thing that you're seeing right now? And what we're doing now is we're trying to now break our studio down a little bit further and trying to get into those moments of what we call proximity and synchronicity. So that's, if you like, being together at a particular time so that you can actually witness these things actually taking place or so that you can actually share those things taking place, and that's a different challenge.

Speaker 1: 23:53

Because that was my thing. I was thinking about your virtual space and the way OU tends to be is about the synchronicity, because there's something very much, if you think about the classroom situation that you've got the children, the students in that space kind of captive for want of a better word for an hour, whereas at OU, how much of this is asynchronous. And so, therefore, what's lost and what's gained, do you have more time for that, listening in to ferment, do you know what I mean? Whereas the, the children, or a virtual, an actual, uh, studio, it's in that moment and because of the busyness of you know particularly children's lives and going from one lesson to another, do they have that time for it to ferment, if that makes sense?

Speaker 2: 24:43

can I jump, jump in there? Yeah, sorry, before you get a chance to answer that, derek, what would this? That's really naughty, isn't it?

Speaker 2: 24:53

One of one of the things that is making me think about is about, uh, theories of cognition and cognitive neuroscience and the sort of the prevailing thing we've got in in in schools at the moment around cognitive load theory, for example, which is which is very much connected to kind of how we, how we process information in the mind and, and it can be argued to sort of, to sort of further a bit of a separation between mind and body, if you like, the things that we think and the things that we do, and how we know and sort of processes of cognition.

Speaker 2: 25:31

And designing is really connected to doing, isn't it?

Speaker 2: 25:35

It's not just about thinking and what's in the mind, and so what you're talking about in terms of those practices around around studio, derek, is about using designing and thinking with the rep, the sort of fit, more physical representations of thinking, designing that we've got around us and in front of us, which kind of excuse me, which kind of links a bit toolas blom, and actually in your debates, book um allison talks about, um, the extended cognition, yeah, the extended cognition theory for designing and really he really, really makes it really sort of um, well, it's so useful, so clear that the doing part of part of the externalization that you know, when we use a model or we use post-it notes or mind map or something, we're not just externalizing our thought, we're thinking with that process, with that method.

Speaker 2: 26:34

So, in a way, what you're the reason. Sorry and sorry again for jumping in there, but what I'm hearing when you're talking about studio is that the practice is part of of the method of designing, it's part of the process of cognition for designing, that that assemblage of kind of things and people and and practices and all of those kinds of things is part of how, how we do learning in in design. Sorry that.

Speaker 3: 27:04

No, not at all. I mean it does actually connect, believe it or not, because that extension of cognition is actually incredibly important. Studio is one of the most important spaces where you extend cognition. We've got several properties in the book where the different types of extended cognition are actually quite important to recognise. It's not just that it's quite a handy place to put your sketchbook, it's not that it's like where and how you distribute your cognition in space and how that is interrupted. There's a lovely paper that I still keep going back to. It's tidy up or don't tidy up after you leave the classroom and that's a reaction against not having fixed studio spaces where you have to completely reset all the desks and tables and chairs and that interruption to cognition. That's incredibly disruptive. I mean it must be incredibly challenging to teach in a secondary situation. I was actually thinking this morning. I do remember the little drawers that we used to have in school. At least you had a personal space that was in the drawer.

Speaker 2: 28:06

But even that disruption to where you left off that could be, that could be quite difficult well, you know, but in primary school that's still that's still a thing and kids quite often in primaries have have their own drawer and that's because they are only in one classroom. The classroom is the studio, if you like, but in secondary obviously completely no no, absolutely, and and again, the the studies that show the interruption to cognition.

Speaker 3: 28:35

that happens if you know you are interrupted. We don't tend to take it seriously. Because you know what designers do is drawings, isn't it? You know that's all they do. They don't do any other kind of stuff. We hide all of the messy sketches. We hide all of the other cognition. We hide all of the pain, all of the emotional stuff. We suppress all that. We don't tell our clients it, if you want to think of it that way.

Speaker 3: 28:54

So that effort, that cognitive effort that goes into actually creating a design, we don't foster it particularly well. Or let me rephrase that I think studio is one of the privileged spaces where you could actually do that in a higher education setting and it's still that for a lot of disciplines, when it's now eroding, we're actually starting to see an erosion of those kind of cognitive skills. Believe it or not, ai is definitely challenging it in a particular way. We might come back to that later, but your first experience of that is probably still at higher education and you may be privileged enough to in a secondary school and maybe in higher art or a-level art.

Speaker 3: 29:30

Um, sorry, I know there's slight differences between the scottish and english educational systems. But you might, once you get to higher levels, have those little pockets, if you like, of personalized space, whether it's a setup that you're painting or whatever it might be, but they're quite rare. You won't experience them until you get to higher education. Yeah, and that can be challenging, because that leads you into the situation of well, here is a space, it's up to you to make use of it, and you're not even kind of told that, you're not even told that you can inhabit. You have to almost kind of learn it through a series of steps, repetitions, rituals, um, yeah, anyway, there we go, yeah you're making me think I.

Speaker 1: 30:08

I remember when I did my first degree at brunel so mine was industrial design with education, and there was a studio and I just found it intimidating and never went in that space. There was never any absolutely that space.

Speaker 1: 30:26

There was never any absolutely being made in welcome into that space or, you know, you just felt like it was the particular group and you sort of felt excluded and therefore that then sends a message that you're not a designer, and particularly as I was on the education part as well. But I was also thinking, derek, when you were talking there about that studio space. Think about children often have that at home. Not all children have that privilege of having that space, whether it's their desk space in their bedrooms or somewhere where you know, and they they create that um to, to be their, their studio space where they can leave things and pick things back up. You know we're all sat um at home in our own studio space but it's safe, isn't it? Because we're not bringing anybody else into it and nobody's, nobody's making a judgment and it is. It is frightening, and you're absolutely right, that we've kind of taken that away. Where it's become that what's shown is the neatness that we used to call it neat nonsense where they put borders on

Speaker 1: 31:26

everything. Um, you know, I tried to bring sketchbooks into into my department, but it was a real challenge because you've got limited time and people are looking for what they need to assess and it's all, that's it. I'd be interested to kind of hear thoughts about how how this practice I mean that's some of the challenges, I suppose how this practice can be brought into particularly secondary, to start building it in. I don't know, but those are my thoughts. I'm now expecting somebody to come on and go. Well, actually that's really interesting. But can we now talk about this on and go? Well, actually that's really interesting. But can we now talk about this?

Speaker 2: 32:06

that's not a dig alice at all, but you know well, it just I just was really struck with how these things are kind of connected and trying and thinking about relating it. Actually, you know, one of the big challenges in in secondary education at the moment is our sort of prevailing frameworks and systems for thinking about education, doing education and, you know, for design and technology, certainly a very narrow focus on cognitive neuroscience approaches to learning is actually can actually be a bit of an issue. But also there are other things, you know, and lots of kind of buzzwords floating around at the moment, like things like dialogic practice and is is more of a thing within certain frameworks and and how we have high quality, um teacher student talk and I see that as a massive opportunity around, you know. Or I see studio practice as a massive opportunity around um, things like that, because for me, so when I, when I go back and think about how I was trying to trying to approach, uh, my sort of enculturation approaches in the classroom, really really fundamental to that was the literacies of design and technology and that's about opportunities for dialogue between student and teacher and student and student and also designer and designer, but also designer and the thing that they're designing, student and the thing that they're kind of working on.

Speaker 2: 33:41

That's a dialogue too. The thing that they're kind of working on, that's a dialogue too. And so, um, we need words for that, but we also need kind of ways of doing it. That's part of the literacy of it, and it's not literacy, it's not just about the language that we speak, it's the language of, of how we do things as well in in designing, I guess. Um, so I sort of my tendency, my tendency is to look at those frameworks that we have to operate within and see opportunities around that.

Speaker 2: 34:11

And Alison, you touched on assessment being a challenge. Already that is a challenge, and quite a concrete one in some ways. Yeah, and quite a concrete one in in some ways yeah, that's my opener.

Speaker 1: 34:30

I know that kate was in last. I know that k was in talking about assessment with goldsmith students, wasn't she? Um? This week we were, I think, and I had a great conversation with k stables at the weekend about, about assessment and dnt and I've got a. I've got a rather controversial podcast coming out this week where I it it's a subscription one where I say maybe our assessment system isn't fit for purpose the non-examined assessment, maybe it's time for it.

Speaker 3: 34:55

I completely agree.

Speaker 2: 34:56

Anyway, there we go. That's a whole other topic. Sorry, that's another conversation.

Speaker 3: 35:00

Well, could I jump in on that and actually just do a quick rant. If we are talking about I'm going to take like you cannot have multiple ideas in education and multiple policies contradicting one another and sadly, most of the time we do okay. So if you're going to do cognitive load theory, then you cannot also then deny all of that other stuff that goes with how designers deal with cognitive load, for example. Um, you know, at maximum capacity you're using 40 percent of your body's energy in your thinking as a designer. It's absolutely huge, it's absolutely fantastic. But that depends on things like extended cognition. It depends on offloading it in different spaces. It absolutely depends. Alice, you're absolutely right on the dialogue with the object. You offload so much to the object, to the representations that you create with that, the materiality, yet none of that is valorized or finally treated as a knowledge object. It's never actually treated as a thing in and of itself. So if the two things are completely and utterly contradictory, then you do not have constructively lined up, you know, learning in any sense whatsoever, and that's because a lot of this stuff is being written by people who are not designers yeah, yeah, absolutely that's not a controversial thing to say

Speaker 2: 36:11

but that's the problem isn't it also to do with with, you know, the assessment tail wagging wagging the rest of the dog? You know assessment drives so much of how we do things and um, and really that that what that boils down to is kind of accountability measures more than anything else. So actually it's completely de-centers in the end that the, the, the learner themselves, um and and is and is very reductive, but in in terms of kind of how that looks in the classroom, it can only lead to a very linear, stage-by-stage kind of process of designing and making, because you know it is really challenging within that framework to think of how you can assess group work, quality of conversations, the development of an idea, when you've got nothing concrete in front of you to look at, to represent the learning that took place, as it were, in those kind of traditional senses. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 37:20

Yeah, I mean. That presupposes, though, that what you're interested in assessing is the learning.

Speaker 2: 37:26

Well.

Speaker 3: 37:29

Again. Well, it's not just the assessment tail wagging the dog. It's then the purpose of education in society. Wagging the tail of the dog, if you see what I mean and you know that is completely and utterly deterministic, or transactional.

Speaker 1: 37:44

The other side of it sorry, I'm going to just butt in there and it's. It's about assessing the learning, but we need to define what it is that they're actually learning. And when we're using this very uh, politically laden word about knowledge and then we're not defining clearly for ourselves within the subject what we mean by knowledge and I'm kind of, you know, I I think it then becomes very difficult for us to say that the learning that we need to assess is about growth of knowledge, skills, qualities, adaptability, which brings back to, you know, design and technology capability, you know. So I've done this work for Ofsted, looking at what does the research say for design and technology, about what is high quality curriculum and such, and I found that really interesting because obviously, you know, going back to what you said about cognitive load and the science, that's been very driven and the Ofsted framework has been very driven by that. So it was really interesting to look at the literature, knowing that I had to work within that framework, whether I liked it or not, work within that framework, whether I liked it or not, and it was like a big decision about do I do I do this, but we do need to do it because we need to enable the design and technology community to have those conversations and and I actually found that really refreshing because actually, what I thought Ofsted was saying was not actually what they were saying. Does that make sense? They weren't trying to make design and technology fit something. It was like, genuinely, what does the research say? And so when we looked at knowledge okay, they used the word knowledge. Actually, what was then coming out of it was skills.

Speaker 1: 39:36

Again, I think we should be really careful when we use the word skills, because that's laid and is it we we talking about thinking skills, which are really difficult to what do we mean even by that? But I I think there's this lack of conversation around. What do we mean by knowledge? And therefore, what are children learning and why are they learning it and what? What does it? Do you know? What do they do with it? That's that's the key thing, isn't? It is, and it's not about just knowledge about what the material is that you clothes are made of. It's that designally approach, that design of thinking, that that learning to listen, you know, go back to what you were saying earlier, derek, about that. Listening in, you know, that's they learn. They learn to do that by watching by, you know that doesn't just magically become. It's like me going into this design studio at university. It's you kind of have to be taught to feel that's your space.

Speaker 1: 40:36

Thinking back to that spectrum anyway, I feel like I'm rambling now because I've had a moment to speak and I've no, it's definitely a relevant point.

Speaker 3: 40:46

I mean, I was sorry, alice, did you want to come in?

Speaker 2: 40:49

No, no, you go.

Speaker 3: 40:50

Well, I mean, it was one of the hardest bits to write. In the book we've got a section on like general educational sort of foundations and bits and pieces, and one of them is knowledge. And again, I've said it already, I think, earlier in the session today I don't think we take seriously design knowledge or the types of knowledge that designers hold, whether it's materiality, whether it's embodied knowledge, experiential knowledge. We don't take it seriously because the time you get to secondary education, seven, eight, nine years probably, maybe a little bit less, at least seven years of being told this is or these are the forms of suitable knowledge this is the way that you describe knowledge. People who know things wear glasses, they read, they write. That's what they do, that is what knowledge is and that's not what knowledge is for 99% of people okay. So we suppress that at our peril, and we have been suppressing it for a long period of time, by the way.

Speaker 3: 41:49

I think other disciplines really really benefit from embodied knowledge, particularly in maths, for example. Embodied cognitive maths is really important. Material maths is really actually quite useful to people. Anyway, that's a bit of a diatribe, I think. Maybe internally, alison, that would be useful to have a conversation about would be. What do we mean by our knowledges? What does that mean for students? I'll give you two examples of that. One would be simple knowledge at one end We've already talked about it in culturation Just knowing certain words like symmetry, like, say, balance or all of these things, and not even knowing them, necessarily knowing what the definition might be, but then knowing how it's applied in different contexts, how designers use that word in order to do different things. So you've got the knowledge itself, the, the explicit knowledge, the declared facts, the tacit stuff at the other end, which is the. Well, how is that used in practice? What do you do with symmetry? And then you've got the really tacit stuff, and this is important. It's really important because we use tacit knowledge all the time as designers.

Speaker 3: 42:50

That's knowledge that you cannot symbolise. It's knowledge that you cannot write down. Or let me put it another way Maybe you could write it down. You know, for all those determinists out there and those learning outcomes, that's absolutely fine, I've got no problem with that. But if you write down how it is that you judge and create a sketch, you would end up with 50 000 pages of words as opposed to just spending five seconds demonstrating.

Speaker 3: 43:13

And it's that type of knowledge, that other type of knowledge that's also quite important, that is sometimes transmitted in higher education studios. Perhaps I don't know, it depends on the teacher, depends on what knowledge domain the teacher comes from. In a secondary setting that can be harder, you know, to cover, to demonstrate that, and then you go right up to the far end where it's actually attitudes and dispositions, not knowledge, that's actually more important. So the attitude that I bring to design setting for a client is far more important than sometimes my skills and abilities. It's actually just me being there. That can actually be quite good. And that's before we get to the design superpowers, the ability to come up with good ideas under pressure or all of these other extended cognitive things. So I think there's a wide range. I think it would be well worth having that conversation, alison yeah, massively.

Speaker 2: 44:01

I think one of the things that I agree with with all of that and I think one of the things that can help us to sort of locate this in the classroom as well is is I've always thought of of a big purpose of design and technology education secondary schools to develop design and technological literacy, to understand the world around us and how to, how to, how to know it, how to use it, how to talk about it, how to how to experience it, and and how to make it work for us as well, and and and I was always really struck with john dacre's definition of of design and technology, or technological literacy, and he talked about it being an assemblage, you know, um, of loads of, you know all the kind of the things around us, um, but that it's an ongoing process of becoming.

Speaker 2: 44:48

It's not possible to to ever be technologically literate, because the world around us is constantly changing. The assemblage is always shifting and and rebalancing, and, and that is much more, that's thinking about knowledge as much more a kind of way of being, isn't it? It's much more about, um, it's about knowledge as kind of well, knowledge as practice, but just knowing how to respond, react you know, rewrite all of those kinds of things, one's own experience in the world, and that to me seems like a really important aspect of design and technology education, when you know we might well be sort of educating future designers and all of that. You know all of that kind of higher end of knowledge stuff, but actually also we're talking about how to know ourselves in the technological world, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 45:43

So, on that note, because I'm conscious of time, I'm going to ask you both if you'd like to wrap up with some kind of takeaway points, because I think we need to come back to this. I don't have to go. Yeah, I can see that we're going to blow your head off with takeaway points.

Speaker 3: 46:03

Part two.

Speaker 1: 46:04

Yeah right, but I'm just thinking. I've got people listening, a whole variety of people listening from, predominantly in the UK UK, but internationally, involved in design and technology education, a whole variety of ways, predominantly teachers. What's a couple of takeaways or something that they might kind of go away and think about from this, because if they're anything like me, I mean we've I think this is our third conversation about this topic in preparation for for today, their heads will have blown off, got loads to think about. What's something they can kind of take away and just reflect on, think about, read. Look at, derek, I'm going to start with you that is a tough one.

Speaker 3: 46:44

Um, unfortunately the book is coming out next year and basically just I'm not. This is not a plug for the book. I am so sorry. It's not okay.

Speaker 1: 46:53

So you haven't actually mentioned the book. You've only mentioned it but not said what the book is.

Speaker 3: 46:57

So there you go I guess the only reason I mention it is because it will set out um. It's nearly 60 properties that we've um outlined in studio um, and they range from things that you might recognize. You know, things like um making or artifacts, things that you might recognise. You know things like making or artefacts, things that you would see in studio, things that you'd do in studio, that are quite obvious. But there's also things like serendipity, you know, luck playing a part, no front, the fact that a studio is organised spatially very differently, right to the pragmatic that a studio costs money. Anyway, what I'd love to do, because we've been looking at the higher education setting for this I'd love to use this almost as a starting point to then ask which of these might be usefully. I'm not saying translated or transferred, maybe that there's already something far better happening in the secondary school setting, but I would love to start a conversation that might ask the question oh, that's interesting, might we try this in here or might we try this in there, because I'm pretty sure that we are incomplete in terms of the properties we have. There's probably some there's.

Speaker 3: 48:00

I'll give you an example. It's a stupid, stupid example. We don't have a word for it in higher education it's called active teaching. Okay, so we had to come up with this term, active teaching, simply because, um, there isn't a term for what you do as a good primary school teacher, a good secondary school teacher, which is wander the classroom looking for opportunities for students learning. Ok, you do it all the time in the studio, but we never talk about it, we never actually express it as a pedagogical thing.

Speaker 3: 48:26

What are the different techniques that you use as a teacher to wander through the studio to look for what the things that you look for? Is it people? Is it things? Is it doing? Is it material? I don't know. We had to kind of like create that term because we just do it in studio and I know that secondary school and particularly primary school teachers, it's part of their embedded practice. Is that constantly wandering the room, constantly asking the question where else could learning take place here? So there's a thing that we've just identified here that you already know in a secondary setting and we need to get I've said this the last podcast as well, alison, we need far better links between secondary and higher education discussion. Yeah, it's just not good enough that we're having separate conversations.

Speaker 1: 49:07

But this is hopefully part of that space.

Speaker 3: 49:10

Definitely, absolutely and yes, and thank you for the opportunity for it also, and it really is appreciated now.

Speaker 1: 49:15

I'm loving the conversations alice over to you.

Speaker 2: 49:20

So there's, so there's so much more I want to discuss I know about studio and, uh, you know, but I suppose in particular um about pedagogy and sort of pedagogical kind of content knowledge and how we're confident to be sort of designers of learning experiences and all of those kinds of things. So I guess for the moment my big takeaway is and I think I'm right, I think this would align with what you've kind of been talking about, derek, but I well, I hope actually is that um in the in the class, in the secondary classroom, setting studio doesn't necessarily need to be a kind of all-encompassing approach and actually that is just um, not not something that that is actually seems that attainable in the current kind of educational landscape anyway, but it's so worth just unpicking and and thinking about aspects that might contribute to this idea of sort of studio um, and and part of that is about, you know, thinking through pck, pedagogical knowledge, how we turn our subject knowledge into sort of meaningful, engaging learning encounters, learning experiences opportunities. But a big part of that is also risk, and something that I think we haven't really talked about in this podcast is not having a predetermined outcome. We've touched on it, but I think we haven't sort of unpicked that for studio and actually that is really really important, I think, to this. And you know, certainly in my own experience in the classroom I was a head of department in the second school I was teaching, so I had, I had the the.

Speaker 2: 51:18

I was in the position to be able to change things and to to rethink units of work and the length of time we were going to spend on this, that and the other, and you know what it kind of all looked like and that was that was I was very lucky to be in that position and that was that was I was very lucky to be in that position. It's very hard to kind of to do that if, if you're not in those kind of positions, and sometimes, even if you are, it's very hard to do. So I think, just, you know, having a think about setting up opportunities for there not being, you know, a predetermined outcome for letting it come through, it is really really can be, can be really really fruitful, but also challenging, because how do you assess those things and how do you, you know, organize resources for those things? You know?

Speaker 2: 52:01

yeah, that sort of goes alongside the knowledge of designing stuff um but there's just so many opportunities around it to to think about different ways of doing things.

Speaker 1: 52:12

I love how I ask you both just to sum up and just give me a night. It's like a whole other podcast. You've just gone into the pair of you know no, but that's that's, that's grand, I mean. I mean, people listening must be thinking, will think well, allison didn't say very much. I think you know, because I'm just in awe, genuinely, genuinely, um, this has been a huge learning. Every conversation I've had with you two has been a huge learning for me.

Speaker 1: 52:35

Um, but I'm just going to come back, uh, derrick, and pick on something that you just said about this, uh, higher education and secondary talking. So, um, it'll be coming out soon on social media, but it's I'm organizing, hopefully at nottingham trent, if I can get funding. If I can't, it'll be online an an event in January for higher education people involved in design education to come together and hear about what's happening in secondary, to share some of that knowledge and to start to think about what are these stakeholders thinking about secondary and what the synergy might be. Organising that with Daniel Latham, who's at UAL University of the Arts in London, partly as part of the curriculum review that's going on in England at the moment, but also just to kind of feel that this is the right time and the right space to start, so it'd be great to have both of you involved in that. I'll send you details.

Speaker 1: 53:32

That'd be awesome, yeah, yeah but just as a aside, we need to. Yeah, we need. There's another two episodes here. We could do like more about design studio and there's something about knowledge, but you know, I mean people listening expect those in 2025 and 2026. The amount of time it takes us to get this together took a long time but no, but thank you both of you.

Speaker 1: 53:54

Um, just just really awesome, and I do, and one of the conversations that we had previously the three of us and separately about this is alice, you talked about all of this resonating do you know what I mean? And and speaking to you as your identity, and we didn't even get onto some of that, some of those big words around ontology and epistemology, around this, but listening to you two talk, I find kind of quite emotional in terms of hearing your thinking and I want to say belief and drive. Do you know? Know what I mean? But just that exploration, that designerly way of just being here in this conversation and the way you two talk. So thank you very much to both of you for the privilege of having the time with you both. It's just fab, thank you.

Speaker 2: 54:44

Well, thanks for giving it to us, and I really enjoyed listening to Derek talking about studio and helping me to make sense of that. It's really really useful.

Speaker 3: 54:54

Thanks, derek no, thank you also. As you say, alison, there's two or three conversations I still want to have now um that risk and failure thing particularly.

Speaker 1: 55:02

Yeah yeah, so thanks again both of you. I'm Dr Alison Hardy and you've been listening to the Talking D&T podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, then do subscribe on whatever platform you use, and do consider leaving a review, as it does help others find the podcast.

Speaker 1: 55:22

I do the podcast because I want to support the D&T community in developing their practice. So please do share the podcast with your D&T community. If you want to respond to something I've talked about or have an idea for a future episode, then either leave me a voice memo via SpeakPipe or drop me an email. You can find details about me, the podcast and how to connect with me on my website, dralisonhardycom. Also, if you want to support the podcast financially, you can become a patron. Links to SpeakPipe, Patreon and my website are in.