Shuichiro Ogawa
日本語

Notes · updated 2026-10-11

What Has Design Education Carried So Far? (Academic Research)

The previous note (what juniors should do when generative AI takes away the entry-level work) argued that what may be lost in entry-level work is less the volume of practice than the route of watching experts' judgment up close.

Contents (8)
  1. Where the question comes from
  2. What have schools aimed at?
  3. The studio as a way of teaching
  4. What has critique carried?
  5. What schools have not carried
  6. Teaching design ways of thinking more widely
  7. How what schools carried relates to what they did not
  8. What research has not yet answered

Where the question comes from

The previous note, What Should Juniors Do When Generative AI Takes Away the Entry-Level Work? (Academic Research), argued that when generative AI reduces simple work in the workplace, what may be lost is less the volume of practice than the route of watching experts’ judgment up close. The question that follows is how far school-based design education has carried that route. This note sets out, from research on design education, what schools have carried and what they have not. An account from employers and practitioners is in the industry counterpart, What Has Design Education Carried So Far? (Industry Sources).

What have schools aimed at?

The aims of design education have been stated as ideals that differ from school to school. Kyushu Institute of Design opened in 1968 as the first university in Japan with a faculty of design (geijutsu kōgaku), and its first president, Shinji Koike, set “the humanization of technology” as its founding idea (Morita 2008). The idea is to advance technology on human criteria, namely sensibility and design. Looking back at the Ulm School of Design, Betts discussed its attempt to connect science, semiotics, and society, from the standpoint that the estrangement of architecture and design from science reflects a contemporary crisis (Betts 1998). In 2001, Findeli called for rethinking design education for the twenty-first century, arguing that design education, practice, and research were all in a period of necessary change (Findeli 2001). The aims of schools have shifted with time and place, but none of these ideals aimed only at transmitting the skills of making things.

The studio as a way of teaching

At the center of school-based design education is the studio. Shulman wrote that if you wish to understand why professions develop as they do, you should study their forms of professional preparation, and called the characteristic forms of teaching that organize professional education “signature pedagogies” (Shulman 2005). Crowther applied this idea to design, analyzing the studio as the signature pedagogy of design education and explaining its status as the dominant learning environment (Crowther 2013). Shreeve, Sims, and Trowler likewise identified the characteristics of signature pedagogies in four fields of art and design teaching and their role in student-centered learning (Shreeve et al. 2010).

The studio has been theorized as a place that simulates professional judgment inside the school. As Webster summarizes, Schön argued from his studies of the design studio that studio learning simulated real professional action, and he later presented architectural education as a paradigm for all professional education (Webster 2008). In the terms of the previous note, the studio was a mechanism for rebuilding, inside the school, the route of watching experts’ judgment up close.

What has critique carried?

Critique (the “crit”) at the center of the studio has conveyed professional conduct more than skills. From a year of observation and interviews, Dannels showed that students’ oral presentations in design studios fall into four distinct genres, each with specific skills that mark success, and that these presentations function as ritualistic performances (Dannels 2005). Dannels and Martin classified feedback in critiques across studios from novice to expert and reported that the feedback socialized students into egalitarian relationships and identities as autonomous decision makers (Dannels and Martin 2008).

Conversations in critique have also been where hard-to-articulate knowledge takes shape. In a case study of an interior design program at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Venkatesh and Ma reported that critical conversations were a key link in students’ acquisition of tacit knowledge in the social context of the studio (Venkatesh and Ma 2021). Gray analyzed informal critique among peers, outside formal critique, through Bourdieu’s habitus and argued that it serves to externalize design thinking and judgment (Gray 2013).

Forming a professional identity has also been discussed as a role of education. Kunrath, Cash, and Kleinsmann describe designers’ professional identity as guiding professional development and shaping professionalism, role assumptions, responsibilities, values, and behavior (Kunrath et al. 2020). Webster writes that the design jury is a key symbolic event in the education of the architect and that its centrality as a site for learning disciplinary skills, beliefs, and values is widely acknowledged (Webster 2007).

What schools have not carried

The identity that critique cultivates, however, diverges from actual workplaces. Dannels and Martin noted that the egalitarian relationships and autonomous decision-making identities fostered by critique were perhaps more reflective of academic developmental stages or idealized workplace contexts than of actual professional settings, potentially complicating the pre-professional goals of critique (Dannels and Martin 2008). In interviews with ten UX students and practitioners, students stood in a liminal space between education and future practice and were working to build their own bridge between the design philosophy they developed in education and its translation into the complexity of practice (Watkins et al. 2020). A study that collected 123 instances of tacit knowledge from ten graphic designers showed that current design tools leave some of these instances unsupported and proposed guidelines based on the reasons (Son et al. 2024).

Critique has also been described as an apparatus of power. Dutton analyzed the studio through the concept of the hidden curriculum and argued that asymmetrical relations of power in society are reproduced in the design studio, as in other classrooms (Dutton 1987). Noting that critical pedagogues see the design jury as a ritual that coerces students into conforming to hegemonic notions of professional identity, while the more common view sees it as an event that supports students in constructing their own identities, Webster carried out a year-long ethnography in a British school of architecture (Webster 2007). In Day’s survey of 60 undergraduate art and design students at the University of Wolverhampton, students expressed deep concerns about being criticized and emotional, fear-focused responses amplified by the public nature of the crit, and one respondent asked how to make a firing squad less scary (Day 2013).

The theory behind the studio has also been criticized for weak evidence. Eraut argued that while Schön’s notion of reflection-in-action is an important original idea, most of his examples fail to provide evidence of it, and none relate to crowded settings such as classrooms (Eraut 1995). Webster likewise argued that Schön was a remarkably unreflective thinker (Webster 2008).

Teaching design ways of thinking more widely

Design education has also been extended beyond training designers into general education. Razzouk and Shute define design thinking as an analytic and creative process of experimenting, creating and prototyping models, gathering feedback, and redesigning, and they reviewed the differences between novice and expert design thinkers and its application to education (Razzouk and Shute 2012). Kimbell identified three accounts of design thinking, as a cognitive style, as a general theory of design, and as an organizational resource, and argued that several issues undermine the claims made for it (Kimbell 2011). A systematic review of 76 empirical studies of design thinking in higher engineering education found rapid growth after 2018, widespread adoption of Stanford’s five-stage model, and integration that remains predominantly course-based rather than program-wide (Deng et al. 2026). Attempts to teach design thinking widely have grown, but evidence on how they developed students’ judgment consists mainly of course-level reports.

How what schools carried relates to what they did not

From the research above, what school-based design education has carried can be summarized in three points. The first is simulating professional judgment through the studio; the second is cultivating professional conduct and identity through critique; and the third is handing down hard-to-articulate knowledge and ways of seeing through the conversations of critique. These can be read as attempts to rebuild inside the school the “route of encountering experts’ judgment” that the previous note saw in entry-level work.

The judgment that schools simulated, however, was not the same as workplace judgment. The identity cultivated by critique was closer to academic ideals than to workplaces (Dannels and Martin 2008), and students had to build their own bridge to enact in practice the thinking they developed in education (Watkins et al. 2020). This gap is likely to have been filled until now by entry-level work in the workplace. As generative AI thins entry-level work, the place that filled this gap may disappear. This is an inference that combines research findings; no study following the same students from school into the workplace was found in this collection.

What research has not yet answered

No longitudinal study was found that followed design students from school into the workplace and measured how judgment developed in school critique is used at work. No study was found that measured the effect of critique on the quality of students’ work or on outcomes in the workplace. Research on studios and critique in Japanese design education did not get beyond the bibliographic stage in this collection.

Unverified items

No unverified statements remain in the main claims.

References

Author: Shuichiro Ogawa (Design Researcher / Consultant) About me →