A slight return: developing an augmented design studio pedagogy

The reorientation to remote teaching due to the impact of COVID-19 restrictions proved to be both challenging and compromising, particularly in the context of delivering practice-based design education. Central to the challenges faced by many design tutors was the loss of the design studio as a focal point for engagement and learning. As an established signature pedagogy of design education, the studio provides an environment for mediated, sticky, social and habitual exchanges in supporting teaching and learning on campus. However, delivering teaching remotely through a period of enforced separation also proved that through adversity comes new insights, with the accelerated use of emergent technologies to support distributed working revealing new behaviours and opportunities for learning to take place. In response to COVID-19 restrictions, the digital whiteboard and collaboration platform Miro was widely adopted within the UK creative industries and universities alike to facilitate remote engagement. Through the period of November 2020 to May 2021 the authors utilised Miro to create an analogue to the physical design studio environment, providing an easily accessible collaborative space for remote sharing of thoughts and ideas. However, as many institutions now begin to reorient back to campus-based delivery it is evident that some of the pragmatic approaches adopted through necessity can hold lasting value beyond crisis modes of teaching. This paper utilises the key findings from a study of remote delivery experiences conducted by the authors in June 2021 to establish clear benefits for the continued application of the Miro on-line platform within a return to campus-based delivery