Talking D&T

TD&T101 Talking with Derek Jones about design studios

May 31, 2022 Dr Alison Hardy; Derek Jones Episode 101
Talking D&T
TD&T101 Talking with Derek Jones about design studios
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Show Notes Transcript


Wow! This was an amazing conversation with Derek Jones from The Open University about design education and design studios - I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

We mooted the idea of recording a follow up with a live audience talking about design studios and design spaces - let me know if you're interested in this.

Episode transcript

Mentioned in this episode
EdSIG: https://www.designresearchsociety.org/cpages/design-pedagogy-sig

The Distance Design Education site is here: https://distancedesigneducation.com/

There is the Futures of Design Education discussion series (this has hosted a few early and K12 educators): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjBkO1Ss6GoduO6Er4xz_8AAzg9Ay8e55 



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Alison Hardy:

So this is another one of my episodes where I'm talking with somebody I've never met face to face and actually only got to know through social media again. So there is there are joys in social media, but there are some negatives. But this is a joy to connect with somebody who's involved in design education at the Open University. So Derek, I'm going to hand over to you give yourself a bit of an introduction about who you are, where you are, and what you do.

Derek Jones:

That's quite an introduction to that already. Awesome. Thank you very much. Yeah. Well, my name is Derrick Jones, I'm a senior lecturer in sustainable design at the Open University in the UK, the Open University is kind of still slightly unique, that we are still entirely a distance education institution. So we don't have physical studios, we don't teach in classrooms, all our students are completely remote, we have absolutely no entry requirements. So teaching design in that sort of context is radically different to some other traditional contexts. So that's, that's what attracted me, I think, to the Open University. The reason I say that, as well as I actually come from practice, so I don't come from an academic background as such. I'm actually an architect, I'm still, technically speaking, a qualified architect, just haven't kept up with the latest changes in technical standards. But you know, so I've had 15 years of experience designing lots of different types of buildings, I've worked across lots of different design sectors as well acted as a client, not just a designer. So I do still very strongly come from a practice background, if that makes sense of, I suppose product to academic practice, as well, leading to understand, like how the whole production process works right across the Open University. And so yeah, it's an interesting space to work in. We don't necessarily teach disciplinary specific design either. We teach design, as I guess, a kind of form of knowledge in itself. Or as I suppose it's what you would call design thinking these days, I suppose it's, you know, technically speaking, you could argues at the Open University, we are design cognition and the original formation of design thinking kind of started way back in the 1970s. I suppose that's another point I should make is this isn't you? We've been doing this for quite a long time. 50 years now. Our 50 year anniversary of when the first design course was written is coming up. So yeah, we've been doing this for quite a while. So yeah.

Alison Hardy:

There's so many questions I want to ask you already about how do you do a design course when you haven't got a studio? So I'm sure is the obvious question to be asking you because you're like, I can't I can't visualise this then. So I know that oh, you is all online. I've got a good friend who worked in education. Oh, you. So can you give us a little insight into that before we go any further?

Derek Jones:

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Um, oh, god for the start with us. Yeah, good. When there's so much, you've got to unpack even asking that question. It comes from so many assumptions. I mean, you could ask him question, secondary school teachers. And we were reminded of this last week, when we did a presentation on the studio project that we're working on just knows what happens if you're teaching in a classroom where you don't have a studio, you don't have a space that's continuous for students to kind of come back to and they've got their own desk space. So yeah, it's a really big and loaded question. I suppose it goes right back to the very start of the university. And also one of the things I think we're wanting to touch on today as well. Also on the kind of design knowledge stuff that goes way back to Bruce arch after the 1960s and 1970s, the Royal College of Art, the design as a third way of knowing

Alison Hardy:

I'm gonna start cheering you I can hear it Norman's listening, he's going to be cheering. Yeah, okay. Are you touching my heart already?

Derek Jones:

Oh, that's good. Well, just for anybody who doesn't know about it. I mean, it's a really kind of simple concept. But it's never really been, I don't think it's really been taken seriously. So it's the idea that you are if you want to talk about fancy knowledge of design knowledge, is only on any kind of like academic knowledge base, identifying the fact that you've got a few like scientific knowledge or formalised structured forms of logical propositional knowledge to use a fancy theorem. And on the other end of the spectrum, you've got our testing knowledge, aesthetic knowledge, knowledge, that there's subjective and quality that relies on maybe collections of experts agreeing on something. So between these kind of two species, Archer contended that you've also got a third type of knowledge, a noise that is constructed by doing by knowing things by experiential knowing, by creating stuff, and that's where professionals, this is where Donald Shawn comes in as well. The professional practice becomes a space of a particular type of knowing. And I think we pay a lot of attention to both of these other two types of knowledge, particularly in secondary and primary schools. We don't spend as much time on that third type of knowledge we do perhaps in primary schools, you don't really get to play in the sun, but you get to play with the plasticine. But at some point, you're told to put away those things. And that making doodling drawing next pressing in anything other than certain types of forms of expression of knowledge, that's kind of suppressed slightly, because there's definitely a hierarchy. With this, there really is there's a subject hierarchy. And that can be a bit of a challenge. So suppose to go back to the Open University thing, that third way of knowing Archer had the theory, I feel like, there was a couple of really interesting and lovely reports that came out of it. And in all the changes that I've made in secondary education, we can talk about that a bit later. But at the Open University, it was taken really genuinely seriously. And at the same time, there was a whole bunch of work going on in Manchester University, Nigel cross, Robin Roy came from Manchester, I think the PhDs there came to the Open University with design methods in mind. And this idea of design methods is really quite important that you can not turn design into a recipe or something that's really explicit. But there is actually more of a way of going about something, so that you can actually see, there's ways that we go about knowing something and design. And if you follow these steps, it might not give you the exact answer you want, but it will help you move forward. And as long as you are consciously aware of how you evaluate what's happening, and these kinds of steps, that's also part of your knowledge. And you can build these methods up. And that's, that's kind of like one of the, it's one of the secrets, if you like of a secret. But it's one of the ways that we teach design at a distance, it's through methods, if you like or through methods.

Alison Hardy:

Interesting, interesting. I was having this conversation. When a swear some people think when the swear in the in the UK with somebody from Ofsted the other week about design education knowledge. And and I'd kind of come to a probably quite a late realisation that there's a confusion sometimes in Design Technology Education, that we're not it's not a pedagogy. It's a design strategy or design method, if that makes sense. So. So for example, I might use, you know, teach children about or teachers but a creativity method by way of generating ideas. But I don't think about how the children are learning that method. Yeah. I demonstrate that method, without then helping the children realise it's a method that they have in their toolbox to use. And that's what I mean about this confusion sometimes between design method design strategy, and pedagogy. Yes, yep. And that's where I think sometimes there's that design knowledge design thinking kind of gets lost in Indian tea, because we're not making that. And it's not a clear demarcation. But, but there is, but equally a pedagogy and in design and technology, which Matt McLean talks about his demonstration. And so we demonstrate the method by doing it. Whilst we're guessing that the demonstration is the pedagogy, and the method is what we're demonstrating that the pupils are kind of going around in circles, you know, I'm going Yeah,

Derek Jones:

no, absolutely. I think that Well, again, it's it's what we, I guess we kind of don't talk about very seriously. So I suppose it's the opposite of knowledge as an object. I mean, a really trivial example, is remembering something. So the fact that Paris is the capital of France, that's almost like, it's like, the gold standard of knowledge, because very few people argue it, some people do. But let's not go there. Just know. That's another story, like so you have these kind of like easy types of knowledge. And it's really, really, really tempting to just fall back and all of these easy kinds of types of knowledge in all subjects do it. Even in design you I still remember that, you know, there's 150 mil from the ground level to the first level of the DPC simply for reasons I couldn't even explain what those reasons are. I just remember the fact. James Webb young, the graphic designer, when he wrote his little book and technique for producing creative ideas, referred to that type of knowledge is rapidly ageing fact. It's almost worthless. But as designers, these are actually quite useful, but it's the use of which we put them that matters. And the problem is that even in other subjects, like chemistry or like mathematics, it's actually this other type of knowledge that we don't talk about is actually more important. So whilst it's easy to remember, a squared plus b squared plus c squared, it's actually the experiential knowledge. The way that you go about working out the right angled triangle is actually much more important than remembering the fact of it. And again, reopen University we've actually made lots of moves, believe it or not in mathematics, to move to these kinds of lessons like tacit transfer. This is classic Polonius stuff. It's showing students what math mutations actually do. And that's the difference of you like between knowing that or knowing how or knowing off. And again, we don't spend enough time talking about that second type. And basically, design is a good 80 90% of that second type of knowledge, experiential knowledge, contingent knowledge. And I think, teacher training that focuses on that kind of laptop type. So that example that you gave, you might demonstrate to students some things if, for example, creative idea making, completely, it's almost completely different teacher training that's required or teacher attitude that's required to develop the space within which the students learn for themselves. And this is where it's classic constructivist learning. But it's providing that opportunity so that your demonstration is like that, that lovely phrase that I can't remember who has it that that like, but not exactly like, because it's necessary that each individual student does have their own slightly different version of doing that thing. And that that individuality is actually the thing that's celebrated, the line value will always come out as a result of it, I don't think we're good enough at expressing the value of these different types of knowledge construction. And partly, that's our fault as both design professionals and as design educators and design school,

Alison Hardy:

because we kind of we kind of we kind of steer away from that type of conversation. And, you know, again, I'm kind of thinking with, if some people in government policy or listening to this me talking about construction isn't constant, I always get it wrong, which one it is, but anyway. And around experiential learning, there's a kind of a shock to come say, no, no, no, that's not that's not learning. And I think I can kind of see where they're coming from is because sometimes it's been completely abused that, that there's nothing independent, there's no clear pedagogy or relationship to the disciplinary knowledge, okay. And people can't see me but I'm kind of making waves there to say this isn't about facts, but the disciplinary knowledge, to be able to articulate that in a conversation or in a talk to pupils or just to the setting up of an activity that's done in such a way that what they're learning and Matt McLean talks about knowledge in action. Yeah. And you know, that that is really clear and articulated. So yeah, as a result, we fall back on facts. Yes, yeah. I hear all the time in Danti, about theory lessons, and I think I used to do theory lessons. What was I doing that nobody was talking to me about? Why was it doing them? Yeah, yep. Where do they sit? What are they for?

Derek Jones:

Yep. No, I completely agree. I think we undervalue that side of what we do as designers. I've been thinking in a recent talk I gave, I talked about almost certain cognitive processes of design thinking moves that are actually close up to superpowers and anything else. And again, I go back to where we fall down, if you like, is design professionals. And sometimes we never present to clients, the 99 failures, we never ever are very rarely let people see the messiness of studio, we always present that final world design. And there's so much focus on that you forget just how much effort goes into all of that other stuff. So that's partly our own fault that we've preserved this mystique, if you like, the napkin sketch on a napkin, or the aha moment, and all of those just absolute, you know, it doesn't add a whole bunch of effort that goes into leading up moment, okay. And there's lots of good literature that supports that. What we haven't been good at, I think, as educators and professionals, is preserving the specialness of that, and actually talking about it in very serious pedagogical terms and give you an example. So how do you deal with a hyper complex problem project? And I don't just mean complex, I mean, potentially a wicked project? How do you deal with something that is so difficult that you just don't even know where to start? As a designer? I know what that feels like, I know what staring at that blank bit of paper is like, and one of your learning outcomes, if you like, if you're teaching any kind of design, is to help students deal with that moment of where do I start? How do I actually go about this process, but we don't talk about that as much as we do the outcomes or the other bits and pieces. Another example and this is where I do believe it does touch on almost like cognitive superpowers is like, say an optimism switch. You know, like, where you have to very quickly, really, really become deeply, deeply creative, within like 30 or 40 seconds and then snap back out of that. So you go back into a realistic mode, switching between all these kind of like cognitive modes of operation. It's really he is deeply tiring be. That's where the effort is. That's where all the ideas come out of, and then you hide all of that stuff and you only present the solution. But that's the stuff that you need. That's the stuff that you need to learn if you like, as a designer, it's not the it's actually the process and the procedures that you go through, I think if we can start to build up the language around about this so that we actually take it more seriously, as educators as teachers, and then we can help students take it more seriously, and then helped to look after themselves almost to like, learn how to use a bit more seriously. I think that would definitely help everybody.

Alison Hardy:

And I also think we able to articulate it better to people outside the subject precisely. So

Derek Jones:

absolutely.

Alison Hardy:

So that, you know, it's understandable where we've got to in schools in a way because if we've not been having these conversations within, and we've not been able to Mmm, I'm continually developing my understanding when you said some things that I thought, not no idea what you're talking about. But am I No, no, no, no, no, don't apologise, don't apologise. And partly being pushed to understand and hear about the things that you wouldn't hear about is part of the way you can, I need to go for I mean, I've already written 10 things down a bit of paper that I'm gonna have to go back and pick up on. And I've now completely lost my train of thought.

Derek Jones:

That's a lovely thing about what we do, isn't it both as teachers and as designers, and it's what James Webb young talks about, as well. These rapidly ageing facts are still useful, like pick up concrete, quarterly pick up, you know, Emily, and porters monthly, or whatever it is, all designers find inspiration in all of these sorts of things, is that constant quest, but I think there's something deeply deeply related between the desire for just learning for the sake of learning and the desire to be a designer, I think these two things are an intimate relationship between those knights across talked about this as well in haven't developed it, though, I want to ask him about this, why he never did this. But is that not you? He took archers work, and he really did turn it into foundation. But then he also related it to learning for the sake of learning. And it's a very close mechanism to that kind of curiosity and that iterative process that we go through his design. So I do think there's still quite a deep intimacy. And when I see good teachers, you know, the indistinguishable from good designers, the way that they iterate that we are constantly observing, we are constantly being iterated on the processes in our thinking. I see. I think there's a real strong relationship between these two.

Alison Hardy:

I agree. And I reviewed a book recently, I co reviewed it with Daniella Schillaci, Roland, and the book was teachers as designers, which was fascinates me some of the chapters we looked at. And we felt because we were writing it for the design technology, education, international journal. And some of the chapters we felt they weren't fully relevant to the primary audience. But for Daniella, as a teacher, as a secondary school teacher, more of them were relevant because she's a teacher. Yes, completely agree. And it kind of I may was I was willing to work for Lincoln. Well, yeah, just didn't he teachers know this, don't mean because it's part of their culture. But actually, it's really interesting to see it being written about in a general education, book taking, taking these ideas of design. So yeah, I think I think you, you definitely, you know, talking there about things that are happening, but But again, it's when people in the design, education, design practice community, then take that stuff they've been doing in design world, and start a bit like how you saying this isn't a criticism of Nigel cross, start talking about it in a different space, a more general space, that then people outside don't see what is the uniqueness about design education and the way knowledge is formed and created and understood and established and recognised? You know, in the same way Design Thinking I did a podcast episode with David Spindler. We have quite a conversation, I guess, in terms what is design thinking that, you know, and it has been in many ways hijacked by the outside didn t design education community, whilst we don't fully articulate what it is within the design community? Yeah, that makes sense.

Derek Jones:

No, I completely agree. Okay. I really, genuinely do. I think it's only very recently that we've even started to take seriously sometimes our own pedagogies I mean, don't get me wrong. There's been loads of very, very good practitioners who have been doing that for a long time. But because there's the so few of them, in some ways, that voice is really really, really hard. So like some key stable Susan or Alison Shrieve. All these people who are doing fantastic work are still so few of them. But that's starting to slowly slowly change and we're starting to take her Wouldn't pedagogy seriously worth the work that we've been doing at the Open University recently to understand our virtual studio as absolutely hard to change mainstream educational theories so that they fit better with what we understand as design educators. And it shows to me, the lack of attention has been paid to design pedagogy in some ways that we've had to rely on these other experts coming in to tell us how it is that our pedagogy is work that we don't need to, because we are designers, design educators, we know it works, designers come out the other end, people are a little bit more creative after they've been to one of our sessions, therefore, we've never really had to kind of question it. Until suddenly, they start to say, you don't really need that studio space, do you? Or you can just do this in your curriculum instead of this. And it's when you're challenged, if you like in these things to actually see well, what is it about what you do with it so special, that's where we have that kind of lack of language. So I'd really like to see the work of all those foundational writers, academics and thinkers really get taken a lot more seriously, we're starting to see that work being built upon. And as I say, some of the stuff that we do at European university, it has built on that work and put some really quite hard and rigorous, sort of almost not just theoretical, but also experimental and pragmatic results to that our studios are huge, we will have ports of between 800, to over 1000 students in a single studio. That's a lot of students. So again, we can see a different level and scale of say, social comparison, social verification, we have to almost redefine it in design terms to understand what students are actually thinking in doing. So we have to understand our subject and our own terms. And I think there's a growing confidence in being able to do that. And I would really like somebody, I don't know how we go about what the next steps might be. But I'd really like to expand that confidence is not just in higher education, or further or secondary, or even primary education, but that we do it as a community that takes the whole practice seriously as a form of pedagogy. Because that's just really, really awesome really quickly as if you like studio based education is such a simple thing. It's been around for so long, that notion of an expert sitting down with a novice to demonstrate something that's almost as old as humanity. In some ways. It's almost like this is actually a foundational pedagogy from which classrooms have sprung only relatively recently. So you can look at it the other way, if you want to.

Alison Hardy:

Know the reason I was going to interrupt you was to say you're using the word studio. And some people listening might not be clear about what you mean about this, because you said on the one hand, we don't have physical spaces. And then you're talking about 800 to 1000 students in a studio. And I need some help visualising that, and what does that mean, in your practice?

Derek Jones:

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, my apologies for that. Yeah, we've been working on our studio project for a couple of years. I started a while back, it actually started when I was doing my own PhD. I've only just recently finished my PhD, believe it or not, I thought it'd be quite an easy thing I started teaching at the Open University. Firstly, wondering who the heck can you actually teach at a distance? Like, as your question earlier, just really intrigued by it, one of the things that we do do is we have these online studio spaces spaces where students can show their work, they can actually see what's happening with other students work. There's actually lots of little different mechanisms, particularly social mechanisms that are at work in our studios, and because of the size of them. So I've always referred to them as studios. I've always understood them as a studio, because I can see such synergy between a physical studio and where you would also engage in social comparison, social verification, and a whole bunch of other little things. So I see an immediate link between the two, I thought I was gonna do a PhD on competing virtual studios to physical studios, I presumed to be able to just pick up the book over the library, the Bitcoin studio, or the Bitcoin design. Now, it just doesn't exist. There's nothing nobody's ever really sat down and define studio when you pick it might be quite a challenge to actually define studio, but then it turns

Alison Hardy:

out, I'm hoping I'm hoping my laughing isn't coming through too loudly and I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing with you. Because I started my PhD thinking I was doing one thing and ended up doing something different. You know, I decided it was this huge thing. And I ended up just like doing the tiny fraction of what I thought I was gonna do.

Derek Jones:

Yeah, what was what was slightly this mean was the fact that there's there's not really a collection or a really good collection of understanding of what the studio might be across multiple modes. So you get really good understanding of what an architecture studio is in the UK, or what an interior design studio is in this particular professional context. But nobody's ever really pulled them all together with the exception of some of the scholars I mentioned earlier. So for example, Orange Leaves work on the stickiness of curriculum is very close. So it's that idea that a studio has a bit of a culture that kind of propagates itself. But nobody's actually boiled it down to well, could we be a bit more pragmatic about this? Could we see that? Can we collect the properties, if you like, of studio, and that's what we're doing with this studio project is no, we're looking at all of the scholarship in studio and trying to just put it all into a bag. Boys gyms can, I saw would say, one of my colleagues on the project, it's a string bag, it's got massive holes in it, Studio is a flexible thing, it's got a bit of a recognisable set of core features, we don't know what they are, yet, they might not even exist. So there is this kind of weird commonality, but difference. So that's why, you know, for me, flexing between an online studio in our design curriculum is very like are very likely to see the architectural studio that I was brought up in. But I can also see synergies to see a secondary school studio, that might just be sort of doing your quotes from content, the focus is audio only, isn't it. Where there might be a classroom setting where you don't have a persistent space, maybe we are students, the persistence for students is a project or a teacher or a theme, for example, Studio can be a lot of different things, that can be an idea as much as a concept. Again, I don't want to turn it into something that's solely with me, that's what we're trying to do with this. We're trying to bring it all together to at least help different studio teachers and practitioners, at least pull down the bits that they think maybe relate to the studio and say, That's interesting, or this is what my practice is, this is what my practice is. So yeah, that's what we're kind of working on. Just now. So I do see a lot of synergies and my apologies if I don't make those clear.

Alison Hardy:

No, it's okay. It's okay. It's just, it was just kind of like this word studio. Yeah. And I presume, I think really, we don't talk about or don't use that word too much in Designer technology, education, I can hear some colleagues that I know again, I use it, I use it, and I'm sure that there are people, but how they define it, how they see it. Yes. Is it just a label for a label sake? Or is it an idea in a space? That's that's about where knowledge is shaped, created, established? Formed questions, isn't it?

Derek Jones:

I'm gonna hard I'm gonna hedge my bets on this one. I don't know yet. I think it probably as both of the above. I think sometimes people do just label it for the sake of putting a label on it. I think you're absolutely right. I think that's partly because we haven't necessarily had any kind of, we've got foundational work that theorises studio sort of example, Schulman Taylor's work going like signature pedagogies. And that applies the idea of studio to any professional space within which, you know, doing something or practising something, that's where the learning takes place. That's where the is like the simulated space. And they give properties such as, you know, no front, it doesn't have a classroom, it doesn't have a one to many distributed learning mechanism to it. But actually just pulling that together and saying, This is what it means in pragmatic terms. And even a studio, sometimes it does have demonstration spaces, sometimes it does have a one to many components, but then it breaks away and it bleeds off into clusters. And again, as soon as you start talking about it in terms of like connections and clusters, one to many, many to many, you immediately recognise this, but this is just a secondary, good secondary school. That's what you would do. And again, that's just what a good facilitator a good educator would do. So by that definition, studio is much about the kind of curriculum and the teachers in that space. And what that space allows you to do doesn't allow you to do what you can do with the furniture, what you can't do with the furniture, all of those things. So you need to keep I guess, quite an open mind about what studio is in terms of the artefacts is it things as ideas as concepts as it stuff? Is it curriculum as it aims? Is? All of that kind of?

Alison Hardy:

Yeah, cool. Blimey. headspin No, sorry. It's alright. Because me and Matt, were asked by the DfE before Christmas, and it was it was last summer if we would put together have the high level minimal space in terms of that there wasn't it wasn't like a traditional workshop. And so we kind of had a day just sort of playing around with ideas. And then unfortunately with the Spending Review and such it didn't it didn't get taken anywhere but it got us thinking and I suppose you know, we weren't playing around with that sounds playing around with but we were exploring high higher tables with stools and the tables were on wheels so we could move them around. The all of the caps needed to be in the room. We didn't really want to be having stuff. We might have a small store room but we would have handling collections which is like what Kay talks about at Goldsmiths. And Alice heard is just a blog post for us on a blog about this about handling collections. And but we also adopted some of the scaleup ID so if you can get scaleups, knotting Trent of Tana taken quite a long way. And that was about people being in round tables and be able to work on stuff together. And so we would, we were talking a lot about group work and teamwork, which is always a challenge when it comes to assessment. But there are ways pedagogically you can set up that space to do that. But we ended up with a huge wall take up the scale up idea. That was a big whiteboard. Okay, yep. So that we had a projector in the ceiling. You're not You're not writing these ideas and pinch them either. But things like so Sarah Davis and I had come up with a project about biodiversity for year sevens. The setting would be that the children in groups will come up with ideas and manufacture a product to make a garden more biodiverse. Okay, but the items would be sold in the garden centre. And so I was to Matt and say, well, we can project parts of a garden centre, onto that, and we could kind of walk around it, and the children could kind of walk around it and experience it and kind of roleplay you know, some loose and be ideal ideas. And do sort of that, and then and draw things on this whiteboard. Yep. You know, and then you can kind of see, I've written some stuff about design fiction, you know, you could kind of do storytelling with all of that. Yes. Is that a pedagogy? Design? Fiction? No, actually, it can be used in classrooms, but actually, it's a design method, my using that language correctly. But yeah, so yeah, the idea of studio and space, and therefore it does start to inform the curriculum aims.

Derek Jones:

Again, yeah, you're absolutely right. But what it also depends on then as a certain set of key conditions. So that's a lovely example just given. So yeah.

Alison Hardy:

I just feel like I'm getting to tutoring now. God tell me.

Unknown:

I went into I went, thinking

Alison Hardy:

okay, now tell me what I need to do to remove it. What I've not thought about.

Derek Jones:

I think it's actually what you have thought about what you've already included, but maybe you haven't explicitly declared it, if that makes sense. So that's the interesting thing to me about this is that we do. And it's like the the distance design education blog, like a couple of years back, when we were asked to help you open people were moving to online and distance education species, you would have thought that just asking the Open University experts and distance learning we would have been able to say, yeah, you just do this, this, this and this. But as soon as people asked us, we realised just how little we knew about what it was that we do, because so much was implicit. So I started writing it out thinking you just do this. And then people would come back saying, What do you mean, what does that even mean? Because there's 20 assumptions behind what you've just said, Yeah. In something like Flipboard, for example. So abstract not and obviously, abstracting for the sake of abstracting, but that's one of the reasons why we're hoping that the studio properties project, I'm not trying to sell a project at all. It's simply a piece of work for the community and the design education community. And we are interested in hearing anybody's ideas that can fit into this is trying to identify those things that we also take for granted that we assume that are invisible as much as the things that are visible. So the white quartz is the visible thing. What's the ordinance behind that? It's almost like what's the property? Before immediately springs to mind is lovely recipes that we did for Britain to recipe books, believe it or not, when was on recipes for a remarkable research, and that's about species that you can actually create as an architect or a designer or as a worker. And one of the ones that did with Metaverse, Borthwick loans, or who worked for Soma architects in New York. One was about permission, space and opportunity space. And what you're describing there is this lovely idea of permission space, it's a space that doesn't just say, this is the way your behave, it actually gives you certain cues or certain invitations to act in slightly different ways. And that notion of opportunity, space is just as important, because without those affordances without those, like frictionless ways of going from thinking to actually doing, which you can do quite readily with pencil and paper, but doing that in a digital space is actually slightly harder. So there's a whole bunch of what I would call almost like affordances in the space or in the studio here. There's a whole bunch of conditions, having the right people in there having a curriculum that supports it, having the right training and the right attitudes and disposition, you know, your cell phones and how hard it is to do a studio afternoon if you're in a bad mood Just as a simple, trivial example, but you know what it's like, sometimes come down to that I've seen quite a few creative careers ruined by just a bad mood.

Alison Hardy:

Yeah, absolutely. And timetabling, I mean, I talked about in my work. You know, I look at how people value the subject. And as part of that I wanted to involve people who just timetable.

Derek Jones:

Yeah, completely agree. What is yeah, one of the big findings we have from our work on studio distance studio was just how important silly things like. In fact, I'm going to take that back immediately. It wasn't a silly thing, how foundational and important things like curriculum cues were. And one of those cues was how much time do you have to spend in these little, and again, we are very careful about what we call chunking, the Open University to little chunks of learning like a design method, or an activity that sits inside a method and giving the right amount of time to each of these. And knowing that some students will take 15 times as much or, you know, a quarter as much time. And allowing your learning design to flex during the boat that these things are not just nice to haves are things that control it. They're actually things that students use to negotiate their understanding of the subject. So timetabling is one of those things because it gives them an idea of or five does it take me five hours to do something that the timetable suggests it should just be five minutes. The next question is what is wrong with me. And you can see where it goes from there. And again, in a studio and approximate studio. If I was a tutor there, in higher education, I've got the luxury of seeing the confusion that the hearts almost on that students face and saying, I can correct that situation. Because in that moment, if you're lucky to be there at that right time, if you're at a distance, or if you're in a busy classroom setting, you know, sometimes we don't have the luxury in those spaces that our higher education counterparts might have. And that can be quite a challenge. Barrier.

Alison Hardy:

Yeah, but yeah, time similar things timetabling location of the space lights. If you say what did I teach last lesson, to here? What baggage am I am I carrying? You know, what are they carrying? Yes, they come from subjects and not that. So yeah, cool. There's a whole load of things to kind of explore, I don't think we've even kind of touched half the list that we've written. So I'm just conscious of time, you know, and people listening and it really might be their head is exploding. And you've given me a whole list of things. And to follow up and to kind of put in the show notes. I think people really like links to and any stuff about the studio stuff, I think people would really enjoy. So I'm going to bring it to a close, I'm going to say but I am going to get you back because we are going to continue this conversation. And I'm going to say I'm going to put out there. And so if people want to send me questions, or leave me a message on SpeakPipe. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. So SpeakPipe is it an audio way of leaving messages of question of questions that they want to ask you direct or to talk about? Then we can kind of come back and pick some of those those things up? Because there was a whole load of things there that I was thinking I want to know more about that. And I'm sure other people listening will want to know more and, and we could have another conversation? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, you've kind of made my brain hurt. So what would you say that is that's deep cognition.

Derek Jones:

Or it's maybe just complete confusion. It could just be dissonance. It could be just pure COVID.

Alison Hardy:

Just like, this is so out of my comfort zone. How am I going to justify it? Yeah. Not quite. No, no, it's not. It's not you've kind of got my head spinning. And I'm now thinking, emailed Eddie Norman this morning and said, We don't have lunch for a while. Should we get a date in the diary? And I'm thinking, Yeah, I need another meeting with with with Eddie because he'll he'll explain some of these things to me. And we can talk about them in a different way. So now, it's been great, Derek, thanks ever so much.

Derek Jones:

No problem at all. Thank you.