Design education needs physical space
Why the ‘jug-and-mug’ model of education is not the future, but well past its sell-by date, and why we might want to use the potential of digital learning tools in order to create more physical studio spaces on campus
Published in
14 min readJul 18, 2021
Ed. This is a re-cut of one of my early Dezeen columns, originally published there on 18 October 2013, but I thought I’d dig it out and re-publish a modified version here, given the current debates about education and learning environments, spaces and technologies in the context of Covid-19, and of course the long-running deeper currents that the pandemic has highlighted. I've tweaked a bit, but in looking back on it eight years on, the fundamental questions didn't need to change much. The focus on asynchronous 'MOOCs' (very much of its time; the New York Times had called 2012 The year of the MOOC) might now be countered with an emphasis on real-time distanced lectures, via Zoom and equivalent, perhaps, just as MP3s have now faded into Spotify et al ... but the core questions remain the same, as in other environments: What is physical space good for? What is digital space good for? What's the balance and what is in the in-between? This piece sat adjacent to my…
