Collaborative spaces and individual workspaces in design studios: a study on ownership, personalization, agency, emotion, and pleasure

Studio-based design education is changing to include multidisciplinary design teams, geographically distributed teams, information technology, and new work styles. In this talk, I describe the graduate design studio redesign in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. The old studio went from a single room design studio to four interconnected spaces: an area with individual workspaces, collaborative spaces, a kitchen and social cafe area, and a classroom with distance learning technology. Study one indicates student satisfaction significantly improved but some open-ended survey comments suggest that functional needs were met, but some pleasure-related and emotional needs linked to habitation were problematic. Study two used an online survey and a time-lapse study to explore ownership, personalization, aesthetics, function, acoustics, upkeep, and agency in the four connected studio spaces: individual workspaces, collaborative spaces kitchen and social cafe area, and the distance learning classroom. Don Norman’s Emotional Design and Patrick Jordan’s Designing Pleasurable Products books are used as frameworks to explore user needs in design studios.