Extract

With an increasingly unpredictable economy, influences of ‘Design’ must strategically expand into non-allied fields as transdisciplinary design-led practices for sailing through looming uncertainties. In recent years, ‘democratised’ methodologies like Design Thinking and Business Design have gained momentum amid the rise of the ‘Empathy’ economy where designers co-designs with non-designers. Despite the importance of collaboration, the ubiquitous ‘Master and Apprentice’ studio pedagogy remains an impediment. This paper reports the first stage’s findings of a longitudinal research investigating relationships of first-year architecture students’ academic performances of both Collaborative Team Learning (CTL) and the individualistic One-on-One (OOO) desk critic’s formative studio learning experiences and student’s self-reflective efficacy of their self-directed learning (SDL) peer-to-peer (P2P) discussions (without the tutors’ facilitation). Inferential statistical T-tests reveal positive associations of CTL students with higher scores and registering favourable learning experiences. A subsequent T-test, however, fails to reveal any relationship between their academic performance with their self-reflective efficacy of their SDL P2P collaborations. The latter finding cast further questions on how the development of collaborative mindsets can be ascertained. This is a timely study examining how the studio pedagogy can instil learners with collaborative mindsets and communication skills empowering them for the design-led transdisciplinary practices of the future.

Keywords: Design studio; Non-hierarchical pedagogy; Collaboration; Self-directed learning.

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