The university has long desired to be a location for innovation and interdisciplinary scholarship. This desire is especially prominent as entrepreneurship is now part of the mandate for many institutions of higher education (Boldureanu et al., 2020). Yet much of the work being done at the university is hindered by a “silo” mentality of disciplinary isolation and a 19th century model of instruction.

In this paper, we present an anthropological approach to the studio and our ethnographic research on design studios as a radical space for addressing "wicked problems" (Matthews et al., 2022). Wicked problems are vexing because they cannot easily be answered using only one disciplinary perspective. Examples of wicked problems include seaside house designs that can withstand climate change or designs for effective community health systems in an urban pandemic. This paper focuses on the studio as both a place but also a set of tools and teaching strategies for constructing relationships across the disciplinary fields of architecture, art, science, and humanities. We also argue that the studio can potentially be a space where students and faculty can develop epistemic models that often challenge disciplinary knowledge.

The use of the design studio has grown in prominence since Schön (1985, 1987) suggested that studio-based design instruction could be expanded beyond architecture courses to the benefit of students in all fields of study. Design studios tend to be focused around some kind of project, representation, or design (broadly conceived) in which students tackle an ill-defined, open-ended problem through scientific and creative activity (Hoadley & Cox, 2009; Shaffer, 2007). Critique (also called the “crit”) is essential to studio-based learning, as a means to invite students to see their work as iterative, and open to revision. In addition, the crit offers a space for self-reflection and inspiration for continued improvement (Dannels, 2005). Finally, relationship building is particularly important to an interdisciplinary studio; students and faculty with different training and backgrounds work together to develop a common vocabulary and repertoire of resources for addressing their chosen problem. Faculty in the design studio become facilitators of student work, while the students themselves choose the direction of their research and designs.

In order to understand the shared culture and community of practice within the design studio, we use ethnographic methods to examine the relationships among participants. We also interrogate how various elements of the studio's physical features and discursive spaces are leveraged by students and the instructors. We also employ autoethnography to examine our own role as insider/outsider in the cultural processes within the design studio - one author is a design studio instructor and the other is an educational researcher who developed the studio course.

Our research is located at two universities, one in Denmark and the other in the US. We also collected and analyzed ethnographic data across multiple academic years. Participants include undergraduate students and faculty in an architecture design studio and graduate students and faculty from biology and geography in an interdisciplinary studio. We employed autoethnography (Simpson, 2022) from our own experiences as an instructor in architecture and as an educational researcher in the form of journaling and photojournalism. Other data includes: participant observations, interviews of faculty and students, transcripts of studio discussions, collection of artifacts (student design notebooks and assignments), and online discussion boards. We analyzed the ethnographic data through constant comparative methods that resulted in identifying categories and themes (Miles et al., 2013). We explored these themes through analytical memos. We also focused on how students and faculty actively "positioned" themselves discursively (Davies & Harré, 2000) in the design crits through an examination of the transcripts. In addition we explored how the physical space of the studio was used to provide different epistemic perspectives.

Our research on design studio, as a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), points to the ways that participants, each with different perspectives, work together to solve real-world problems. Pyrko et al.’s (2017) definition of a community of practice and “thinking together” mirrors our findings in the design studios. In the critiques, the faculty and students think together to improve not only their epistemic models, but also the way the student/expert interacts with the novice/visitor and the model. The emergent practice of considering different ideas in terms of completing the authentic task, requires that participants navigate the various interpretive frameworks each brings to the resolution of the design tensions at hand. Thus, studio space in our research question refers to the space where “thinking together” occurs. Using various physical and digital models as "boundary objects" (Star, 1998) increased the forms of conceptual representations that afforded discussion and epistemic movement. Like Kidron and Kali (2015), the collaborative model building provided opportunities for dialogues that mediated interdisciplinary convergence and promoted a “‘boundary-breaking’ as a mindset that liberates thinking and promotes mutual growth and cross-fertilisation” (p. 14). From these data, we argue for the design studio’s potential to connect scholars from across fields to develop new knowledge to generate interdisciplinary understanding. Students and faculty experienced the design studio as a radical departure from the normative classroom and a revolutionary space that provided them new interdisciplinary perspectives that challenged long held epistemologies.

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