Design Education in Post-pandemic Age: Examining the Roles Digital Platforms Play in Collaborative Design Activities

Abstract

Due to the experimental and collaborative nature of design activities, studio-based teaching and learning have always been a central part of design education. It is perceived that knowledge is primarily obtained through the act of designing, which encompasses not only verbal conversation with other humans but also real-time material interactions with each person’s physical environment. However, since the global COVID-19 pandemic, design students, educators, and institutions around the world have had to quickly adapt to working and collaborating on digital platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Team, etc. At the same time, there has been a lack of understanding of what these digital platforms can do in collaborative design activities. The study presented in this article aims at exploring the effects of digital platforms on real-time collaborative design activities with a focus on object handling and communication, which are key elements of studio-based interactions. The participant in this study was invited to finish a small collaborative task which entailed building a paper toy with the researcher on Microsoft Teams. It was discovered that apart from facilitating the communication between the participant and the researcher, the digital platform was continuously regionalising, de-regionalising, and re-regionalising the space in the rooms the researcher and participant were working in. This characteristic of the digital platform opens new doorways to studying the roles technologies play in design education that embraces the contextual nature of pedagogical practices in the changing environment of the 21st century.