The Ones Who Have Never Been Physically in a Studio: Myths and hacks of first year basic design students in the pandemic

Abstract

Design and architecture students whohavestarted university in 2020, unlike the students before,attendedvirtualstudioswithout experiencing the physical studio environment. Vast majority of them attended classes from their rooms or living roomsoftheir homes in different citiesand tried tomeet the requirements of the courses.Theircomputerscreenturns intotheir eyes anditsspeakersturn into theirears.They had no other experience to compare this with, yet they haveliveda studio environment, juries and more,even they are virtual.This research focuses on their experiences with an emergency remote teaching basic design studio and their expectations of a design studio environment.By makingshort,semi-structured interviews with first year architecture students(n=14), this studyexploreshow pandemic experience of 2020mightaffect the basic design studio environmentsofthe future.As a result of the study, two themes emerged based on the analysis of the data: The first one, called the myths of the studio, reveals the expectations of the students about the design studios and how they try to realize these expectations virtually. The second theme, defined as hacking the studio, emphases how these students perform some actions that they cannot do in a physical studio environment by using the technologies they have.