Focus on Process in a Design Studio Supports Learners in Developing Feedback Skills

• In Event: Examining Feedback Practices in Multiple Settings With Multiple Perspectives

Abstract

Objective
Learning in a design studio requires students to take personal risks and engage deeply in creative endeavors. At the same time, students must step back from the work in order to receive, evaluate, and make use of feedback from peers, instructors, and visiting experts. This paper describes how a first-year landscape architecture studio is structured for participation in ways that allow students to develop their ability to give and receive feedback.

Theoretical Perspective
Designers learn about problems largely through active, iterative attempts to solve them. As the designer works through initial sketches, the situation in essence “talks back” offering intrinsic feedback to which the designer responds, modifying their approach based on new understanding of the problem (Schön, 1983, Cross, 1995). Designers share their work with mentors, other designers, or clients, and receive extrinsic feedback. Learning to recognize and respond to intrinsic and extrinsic feedback as fundamental elements of practice is key to deepening participation in a studio and becoming a designer. Contemporary scholars (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990, 1994, 1995; Herrenkohl & Mertl, 2010) describe this “transformation of participation.”

Method
This paper is part of a larger ethnography of instructional arrangements or “participant structures” (e.g., Au, 1980; Cazden, 2001; Erickson, 2004; O’Connor & Michaels, 1993; Phillips, 1972) in LA studios. A structural analysis (what opportunities exist) followed by a functional analysis (how opportunities are taken up) describes a culture of feedback and answers the question: how does studio culture impact students’ feedback practices?

Data
Data collected during 2009-2010 following one student cohort included field notes (49 different studio days, off-site fieldtrips); 21 hours of video and audio recordings (e.g., critiques, informal/formal reviews,); and instructor and student interviews. Student interviews explored such themes as navigating multiple/sometimes conflicting ideas about how to approach a design problem; developing criteria for distinguishing amongst ideas through episodes of critique/feedback; taking risks/engaging in public self-revision.

Results
Students come to studio with many different skills and worldviews, impacting how they handle the mix of viewpoints and ideas, and their comfort with and willingness to give and receive feedback. Student interviews reveal learning to embrace risk-taking results in important changes at the level of self, indicated by changes in their ability to receive, respond to, and provide feedback.
Design proceeds via contact with others’ ideas (feedback, exposure to others’ work). Field notes and interviews indicate that professors: (1) oriented learners towards each other’s responsibility, individual and collective, for building knowledge; and (2) stressed studio work as highly visible work with still—forming ideas and a focus on thinking-in-progress. Such studio culture strengthens students’ sense of agency and understanding that ‘failure’ is part of the process rather than judgment—critical when work relies on feedback amongst participants.

Significance
Receiving meaningful feedback publicly from instructors combined with explicit talk about the role of feedback in the design process helped students learn to recognize the qualities of good feedback, provide it to their peers, and engage in self-feedback. Findings have implications for designing educational opportunities to improve feedback practices.

Author

• Tammy Quinn Tasker, Western Washington University