The Ones Who Have Never Been Physically in a Studio

Myths and hacks of first year basic design students in the pandemic

Abstract

Design and architecture students who have started university in 2020, unlike the students before, attended virtual studios without experiencing the physical studio environment. Vast majority of them attended classes from their rooms or living rooms of their homes in different cities and tried to meet the requirements of the courses. Their computer screen turns into their eyes and its speakers turn into their ears. They had no other experience to compare this with, yet they have lived a studio environment, juries and more, even they are virtual. This research focuses on their experiences with an emergency remote teaching basic design studio and their expectations of a design studio environment. By making short, semi-structured interviews with first year architecture students (n=14), this study explores how pandemic experience of 2020 might affect the basic design studio environments of the future. As a result of the study, two themes emerged based on the analysis of the data: The first one, called the myths of the studio, reveals the expectations of the students about the design studios and how they try to realize these expectations virtually. The second theme, defined as hacking the studio, emphases how these students perform some actions that they cannot do in a physical studio environment by using the technologies they have.