It would seem that technological campuses of tomorrow have manifested in 2020 as an essential spontaneous response to a world event. This article examines the current crisis in physical art and design studio learning in higher education as a consequence of the COVID‐19 outbreak and the sector’s response to the fast‐track conversion of blended learning to a distributed model. Universities are focusing on virtual community building where group work, ‘crits’ and presentations are being carried out online. Moving assessment and engagement to online formats has consequences for practice‐based art and design courses: distributed learning changes how we teach and learn. This article discusses the implications of art and design studio education in a time of distributed learning. It considers the loss of control over a physically based, practical curriculum and the repercussions for students unable to perform to the depth and rigour required for creative art and design practice. Studio education is considered a signature pedagogy, and has a distinct set of guiding principles such as facilitating critical play, thinking and making, and a pedagogy of ambiguity. This article examines the successes and challenges of moving these pedagogical principles into distributed spaces to support student engagement, using Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as a research framework. The article also examines pedagogical strategies that support students to engage in physical forms of creative practice that enable them to connect their lived experience in a time of crisis.

The studio is the primary site for learning in specialist Communication Design education worldwide. Differing higher education institutions, including art schools and university campuses, have developed a varied range of studio environments. These diverse learning spaces inherently create a complex fabric of affects. In addition, Communication Design studio education produces learning processes and methods of practice which provide affective sensory experiences for the students. Students may be sensitive to these sensory affects, yet the impact of these experiences may go unnoticed or unequivocally tolerated in the studio environment. This article examines the experiential impact of sensory affect occurring in contemporary Communication Design studio education: investigating the learning processes, within a specialist practice‐led discipline in the context of a studio environment. A preliminary study generated the question: ‘How might Communication Design learning address and exploit the sensory experiences occurring in studio education?’. Therefore this article contextualises how students might benefit from being aware of the affective experiences occurring inside studio education in future research studies. This research is grounded in collaborative practice with students in the field of Communication Design.

This paper investigates the widespread integration of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) within specialist Communication Design studio education in the UK and Australia. The impetus for this paper has grown from the challenges facing day-to-day design studio education and the recognition that the use of technology in higher education today has increased dramatically. Conventional design studio facilities are being reconfigured into blended studio-based classroom learning spaces (often generically termed as ‘studio’). This study compares the lived experiences of students interacting with technology within two differing international studio settings. The two case studies used a Participatory Action Research approach and employed sensory affect as a lens through which learning within studio education was investigated using Participatory Design practice-led methods. The study finds that the Australian participants working within a TEL classroom-based environment faced significant obstacles to engagement and that their UK counterparts, who were situated within a conventional studio environment, much less so. This paper aims to support Communication Design students as they engage with studio education via the proposed transferable methodological framework – the Methods Process Model.

This article discusses the practical and ethical challenges and benefits of using social media and video‐based research methods – also known as Photovoice – to investigate contemporary Communication Design education. The two visual research methods discussed include the social media mobile application Snapchat® and participant‐generated GoPro® video filming. The investigation focused on understanding students’ on‐the‐ground, lived experiences of studio learning within two distinctive higher education case study settings in the United Kingdom and Australia. This study employed Participatory Action Research (PAR) as an inquiry process and incorporated a methodological framework involving a combination of narrative inquiry, visual Participatory Design (PD) and visual ethnography. The findings of this study revealed the impact of specialised studio and classroom‐based Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) on student learning and engagement as the participants expressed differing responses to their own learning and community of practice at each site. The choice of arts‐based educational research methods used for this study allowed the relationships between place, lived experience, and community to be explored. Students, in effect, became investigators of their own practice through engagement in a rigorous set of visual methods, which placed the tools directly into their hands.

This interdisciplinary paper discusses the meaning of open, critical, communal, and discursive learning spaces in higher education. It draws on recent research (Marshalsey, 2017) that illuminates the relationship between sensory affect and learning in studio education. It focuses on the extension and development of new learning configurations in the design studio, augmented by technology enhanced learning. Sensory affect is a form of feedback that can be used by learners to analyse and interpret the impact of the learning environment around them. This study used sensory affect as a lens through which to understand students’ experiences of practice-based learning in Communication Design spaces in two distinct higher education settings in the United Kingdom and Australia.The evolution of specialist design studio learning spaces, from physical studios to a blend of virtual and online educational environments, has led to significant debate about how to design, use and evaluate learning spaces for practice-based design disciplines. The paper uses the methods process model, based on participatory design tools (Marshalsey, 2017; Sanders & Stappers, 2008). The MPM supports students and educators to qualitatively interpret and critique their learning spaces more explicitly within their design education.