The project was developed with a rigorous stakeholder engagement process, including workshops with students, faculty, administrative, custodial, and technical staff. As well, students and faculty from outside the school of architecture were engaged to build a perspective on the external perception of the school as a place of potential collaboration.
As this project represented the first major reconsideration of the studio-teaching environment in the school in decades, we took the position that these voices and perspectives were critical to making a space that not only looked forward to the future,but served as a benchmark of what has been (both positive and less-than-positive). The uncomfortable fit of new technologies and teaching styles on relatively inflexible (and historically grounded) studio arrangements and furnishings may seem simple to solve with more adaptable furnishings and fixtures. Yet, disciplinary inertias remain, and in an academic environment where the stakeholders are also all designers, the method of determining which ‘solution sets’ are the ‘best’ ones to proceed with is a paramount challenge.
During the academic year prior to the implementation of the studio, we were able to secure a public exhibition area in the school and populated it initially with images of design studios throughout history (1300 – 2013,) including a number of innovative designs and contemporary case studies. It was configured as a hybrid digital (using Picasa, Google+ and Facebook) and physical ‘conversation board’ encouraging anyone to post new images, comment on existing images, and/or rearrange images in particular configurations.
A second phase of the exhibition added to this the staging of potential furnishings and technologies that were meant to provoke and/or excite imaginative use (basically, this was our collection of samples and demonstration units). The exhibition served an important role in the stakeholder engagement process, allowing all students, faculty, and staff to participate in a collective vision on a daily basis. As furniture samples arrived – primarily in the way of innovative work surfaces – the exhibit was constantly changing, eliciting always-changing feedback.
Finally we ran a series of participatory workshops in the pre-renovated studio, asking participants to literally label existing elements as “preferred” or “not preferred” and why. From existing furnishings and floor raceways to walls, doors, and windows, we were able to develop a model of preferences that was immensely informative. Among the more interesting results was the realization by stakeholders that the same element could be both “preferred” and “not preferred” – even by the same individual, a measure of the multivalence of components based on aspects of performance rather than the identification of a particular physical object. Together, these discoveries complemented our conceptual framework of probablistic ‘prompts.’ The breaking down of environmental and technological components into smaller elements that afford different aspects of this multivalence allowed the more deleterious aspects to be pulled out while accommodating those aspects that were preferred.