Conscious Learning in Design Studios

This article, as part of a larger Educational Design Research project, analyzes changes in studio teaching across time, seeking core values in order to address current challenges of design education. It reveals structural contradictions in studio education: its project-outcome-focused approach tends to marginalize awareness of learning processes, which proves problematic in an era of increasingly diverse individual study paths. In the twenty-first-century environment, studio teaching faces even more challenges. It struggles to fit into the current structure of higher education: learning processes often occur in an implicit manner, and students struggle to integrate different knowledge domains. Therefore, the author concludes that developing students’ self-directed learning capabilities and making learning processes conscious are becoming increasingly important. The authors propose to integrate competency-based learning models with Objectives and Key Results (OKR), a methodology rooted in business practice, to develop a way of addressing the identified challenges of studio teaching, the prevalent method in design education.