eSTEeM Seminar Series: Scholarship Showcase - February 2026

Disseminating Studio Properties: A Field Guide to Design Education

Derek Jones and Nicole Lotz

“There is something special about studio as a place of learning and teaching.”

The design studio and its pedagogy is central to all creative disciplines in education. Rather than classrooms or lecture theatres, design students learn design by actively engaging in design tasks, in shared spaces, and where educators act as tutors and facilitators. Studio is necessarily student-centred and highly constructivist, whose main pedagogy depends on its flexibility in offering a variety of approaches and methods in learning and teaching. This makes studio very simple in some ways and deeply complex in others: familiar to those who have experienced it; but difficult to define explicitly.

Studio Properties is the first book in a new series on Design Education by Bloomsbury. It brings together the literature around studio pedagogy for the first time in a unique volume that describes rather than defines the idea of studio. The aim is to offer a guide to studio education for those who want to know more about their own practice, new educators entering studio for the first time, and those who manage and organise design education spaces. 

Studio Properties gives design educators and researchers the concepts, scholarship, and language to discuss studio pedagogy with greater confidence. The book, as a designed object, also reveals the potential richness of studio as cultures, places, and peoples, when these are allowed to fully emerge and flourish.

Two of the OU authors will introduce the book: how it was created, the ideas behind it, and how we hope it will be used by design educators and researchers. We will introduce how the book itself and the process of making it were intimately connected to the attitudes and approaches to teaching, scholarship, and research we have traditionally held at The Open University. 

Critically, we show how the ‘virtuous circle’ of movement between these aspects of OU work can also include dissemination in contexts far beyond the institution. With the direct and proactive support of eSTEeM, we have been able to engage in a far wider variety of dissemination ‘types’, allowing us to engage with different audiences in interesting and active ways. These have included a website (studioproperties.org), workshops to help colleagues examine their teaching practices, the development of a card deck to support the design of studio spaces; and even the use of dramaturgical methods to allow educators to ‘perform’ studio as a way to make it visible! 

None of this would have been possible without the support of eSTEeM at the OU and the opportunity to expand scholarship it supported.

Registration

This event is open to OU staff, please visit the registration form to register.