Exploring the ‘Theaters’ of Remote Design Teaching

The distance learning scenario outlined by the emergence of the pandemic poses new challenges to education. Nevertheless, the experiences we carried out as a response to this crisis have brought us to believe that this emerging condition must not necessarily be considered a diminution of our work as educators.The experience we wish to discuss in this paper took place within a course-unit for 2nd year students in Design. The ‘Design Methods’ studio is aimed at introducing students to Basic Design, an approach originally developed at HfG Ulm in the 1950s as a reinterpretation of models previously introduced at the Bauhaus. Basic Design can be thought an inductive knowledge-building principle grounded on an orchestrated progression of exercises. Basic Design is based on a series of intermediate experiences meant to exemplify ‘real life’ design circumstances that once paired with a specific ‘how to do’ training program, can enhance the students’ capacity to develop their own design attitude. In our design studio this took the shape of as a series of exercises revolving around a selection of common domestic artifacts. Originally intended as a way to stimulate the students’ ability to frame their work within a problematic perspective, this experience ended up highlighting unexpected parallels between some key elements in design culture and recent findings in pedagogy and neurodidactics. The hands-on activities we introduced in our exercises to make up for the distance and virtuality imposed by our class’ new distant terms, resolved in much more than a surprisingly efficient outcome. The practical-based line of work we developed, ended up in fact confirming the theoretical perspective of active pedagogy, an approach to education developed in the last century in which hands-on and artisanal practices, play a pivotal educational role in the students’ relationship with the ‘real world’.In our experience, the very act of shifting a relevant part of the educational activities to tangible practices allowed us to overcome some constrains typical of the ‘virtual classroom’ infrastructure turning it into a pro-active, inclusive platform. A learning space, where the sum of the individual, direct experiences carried out by each student at home, became a shared comparative ground for the on-line class, allowing a strong sense of presence and participation. The need to quickly respond to the unexpected modification in the combined effect of two crucial elements in design education: individual engagement and teamwork, has highlighted a series of questions worthy of further exploration. These include the theme of presence – online, in the classroom, within a given learning community, in connection to space and time and in terms of the synchronicity and a-synchronicity of the learning context; the use of our own bodies and physicalities as learning instruments; and the "theatrical" idea of teaching as a device to convey, share, represent the cognitive evolution of a design solution within a remote communityBeyond the future developments of the pandemic crisis, some of the lessons we have learned in this process will necessarily impact our approach to design teaching – either remotely and in person. In the light of such findings – and possibly in the perspective of an increasing role of hybrid and blended educational environments in education – we believe that distant learning should be from now on considered more than just a mere necessity or a commodity.