Some reflections on peri-pandemic design education
I sat down (virtually) for a chat with the design educators at Openbox to talk about what teaching has looked like over the last couple years and how it has changed as a result of the pandemic. I was going to use “post-pandemic” in the article title but I wanted to point out that we are very much in the reality of pandemic living, and that the correct prefix for being in the middle of something is “peri-”. Even with some schools going back to in-person classes or moving to a hybrid model, I expect that the challenges of isolation, remote learning, and pandemic-related stress will continue to persist for educators and students alike. Here are some of the things that were shared.
Drastic changes
“Usually we’d go and do a lot of studio visits in the class. Last year I had to improvise in the middle of the semester. I organized one meetup and we did some virtual visits.”
“Last spring when I was teaching the same course it came as a surprise to all of us. This year we knew it was coming. Some students deferred, while others chose to stay in the program. For the students who stuck around for the virtual experience, the challenge for me was: how can I make sure it’s still a valuable experience for them?”
Student priorities
“I made a plan last semester but I completely abandoned it in the middle. My students were super stressed about jobs. Students from India, Brazil, and South Africa had double the stress knowing that COVID is ravaging their countries. They felt bad that they’re here and can’t help their families, and at the same time don’t want to go back. My original plan was to read three books on designing for inclusion and equity. We got into two chapters of the first book, and my students were exhausted, stressed out, and becoming non-responsive on Zoom. So I did a survey of what they really wanted to learn — how to start a career in design — and redesigned the semester based on that. I brought in a guest every week to share how they got their visa, got their jobs, and got around firewalls that discourage people who need visa sponsorship.”
Making virtual meaningful
“I tried to plan for moments to share with each other details about our lives, to go beyond the academic stuff. I gave prompts like: What’s something that you fidget with on your Zoom calls? That gave students a chance to get up and run around their living spaces and show each other things. I asked students to draw something from the week and share it. We did physical stretches where one person would lead with a stretch and the stretch would go around. Getting more physical, not being fully on screen — those were nice moments.”
“Breakout rooms were helpful in emerging the class. Some people are quiet in a big class, but vocal in the breakout room. These are people who’ve never met in person, who have no studio to meet each other and to hang out casually. This last semester I had more breakout rooms than the previous semester, and I spent more time visiting those breakout rooms.”
Mental health struggles
“I had a couple of students who were not OK and connected them with professional help through student services, and followed up with the school to see if they were getting help. Sometimes I wonder — are those only the people that I picked up on? Were there more? It’s almost impossible to know unless students share. I hope I created space for people to reach out.”
“It is hard. Because of so little information in that small square on the screen that you see people in. There’s no before class and after class in the same way, where people come in early and loiter, which—we also found through the WHSAT project—is an important part of the learning experience. You just don’t know for sure, there’s only so much I could do that’s helpful to students in immediate ways. For example I assigned a big presentation but didn’t give a homework assignment. I tried to give fewer assignments. I tried to make the lecture portion of the three hour class even shorter. The students were so relieved, they felt overworked and really tired.”
Honoring the education
“I’m also trying to be conscious of the fact that they paid for the education. I told them this, I said I can’t just give you less information, it can’t just be fun — that isn’t valuable to you either.”
“I felt an ethical obligation and dilemma. The program was adjusted last year and the fall semester was cut short. All classes were shortened by a week, so instead of a two hour class, they had a one hour class on zoom. They’re still paying the same amount of money but the class is literally half the time. And we’re not doing as much because they’re stressed out, and have other big classes like design thesis. I remember telling them to just spend five minutes on their final presentation and that we’ll do most of the work in class. In the end they learned different things from what they had initially signed up for. The whole experience was harder for students than it was for me.”
Student resilience
“Students have different ways of coping with stress. One of my students drinks this cutely packaged milk drink with a straw, a product she gets in China. Then she pointed her camera at her windowsill and it was fully lined with used up cartons of milk. Another student had a virtual background of her dog and said she would pull her dog into her lap to bring her calm and peace.”
“One of my students gave her final presentation as a potato. It had nothing to do with the presentation at all. And it wasn’t just any potato, it was a rasta potato. You really could only see her eyeballs moving. I said, you know that you’re a potato? And she was like, yeah yeah. Students said that they couldn’t take her seriously. I think she had to do this as a way to cope.”
“When I went to visit graduating students I learned that some of them had moved in with each other when their housing leases ran out. They decided that in these pandemic times they’ll form their own bubble and create their own studio inside their apartments to give each other the social network they’re currently missing from the world. It was a tightly knit class.”
“There’s still a lot of joy. I was surprised by my last year’s student’s thesis presentations. I was a little tempted to skip out on two full days of Zoom but I’m so glad I went because I saw so much ambition and support for each other. The comments in the chat showed how much they cared for each other. It moved and energized me. Their resilience… it’s not all gone. When people have a community that supports each other and they can overcome a lot of things.”
No design without social impact
“I was hard on my design research students, especially in the fall. They needed to do something to tackle systemic problems. This was not the time to invent a new sustainable leggings company. We need to apply design to racism, sexism, economic inequity. Things seen as intractable and cultural but are really systemic issues — they need to be examined. More and more things are out on the table. We can’t think about social impact design as its own category. Design needs to focus on where it’s needed most. In the past I struggled to push students, but this time it was more obvious for them to find challenges they wanted to solve.”
Quotes edited for clarity and anonymity.
