Here I will outline my plans for the student workshop, in which my first year students are invited to collaborate in exploring ideas around working spaces and what makes a good studio.
I aim to utilise UX processes and ideas in this workshop, so that it also offers some pedagogical value for students. The images included within this blog are the slides which will I use during my workshop, to offer students guidance as the exercises proceed.
After signing a consent form (viewable here), and having my research explained again verbally, the workshop will begin.
The workshop begins with perhaps the most important part (or at least, the most interesting part, to me) — asking students to visualise their dream work space.
The students are initially asked just to draw their dream space without captioning it. (For one student with an accessibility requirement, they will also be offered the option of creating a mood board rather than drawing if they choose to do so).
I’ve been really excited by the potential of using drawing as a research methodology, and have done a variety of reading to help understand the potential of this approach.
Pauwels, L. (2019) Visual Elicitation in Interviews. SAGE Publications Ltd. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526421036846496 — this text helped me understand the broad potential of using visual prompts within qualitative research (and asking myself, what if my participants play a hand in making those prompts?)
Hurdley, R. (2019) Drawing as a Research Method. SAGE Publications Ltd. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526421036838861. — I enjoyed reading about the use of drawing as a method of collecting and representing data.
Perrone, R. (2015) ‘Integrating fantasy into the creative process’, in. Conference: The 3rd International Conference for Design Education Researchers, Chicago. Available at: https://link-springer-com.arts.idm.oclc.org/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-61353-1_19 — this reading discusses the validity and potential of ‘fantasy’ as part of the design process — by asking my students to create their ‘dream’ work space, they may stray into more fantastical visions!
The above two slides explain what I want them to do next, which is to ‘caption’ all aspects of their images to explain what they’ve included in their dream space.
I’ve added an additional slide to remind myself to pause at this stage and photograph the students drawings at this stage with the captions attached.
After this, we will undertake an exploratory exercise of removing the post-its from the drawings and grouping them by theme. This will help the group (and me!) get a broader understanding of what areas they consider important in their working spaces.
This is where I get a bit more experimental — I am going to introduce the students to the idea of archetypes. Many of them may already be familiar with the notion of archetypes — in a UX context, we talk about user archetypes, which is a methodology for understanding different audiences and their requirements. I am curious as to whether a framework for building archetypes can be applied to our gathered data on studio preferences to define some ‘archetypal’ studio types which our students desire.
After this, I’ve built a Figjam board, which I will ask students to populate with found (and made) images that best fit with their ideas about these archetypal studios. (This may or may not work depending on whether we’ve managed to agree some archetypes!)
While they continue to find cool imagery online to fit with the studio archetypes, I will reflect a little on the challenges of creating a studio space that meets with everyone’s needs and wants…
I added this final talking point off the back of my first two interviews, which both touched on the idea of a more flexible studio model where aspects of the studio could change on different days/times. I will ask the students to consider what aspects of the dream studio are fixed and which are flexible.
And finally, I will thank the students for their participation!