“Well, a tough question. Congratulations:” How and in what aspects do design students evaluate a design studio course?

Evaluating a design studio course is a complex issue due to its practice-based, rich, and vague nature. This is an attempt to uncover this complex issue from students’ viewpoints as they are the owners of learning processes. Based on a student evaluation template, we particularly focused on nine dimensions of a design studio course, which are broad components students can evaluate, such as assessment, design brief, design jury, design critics, design studio, term, dialogue, process, and relation. This evaluation template, including reflective writings, offers us to find satisfying answers to how design students describe their learning experiences within a design studio course, and in what aspects, they describe these nine dimensions. Briefly, students preferred a wide variety of words or phrases while describing the dimensions of a design studio course in terms of twelve different aspects such as benefit, clarity, (non)connection, cognitive process, emotional impact, fairness, interactivity, progress, spatial and studying conditions, quality and type.