Learning Frontiers: Concourse for Ideas

Design studios are concourses for ideas. They are spatial arenas for learning and discovery that assemble and allow the formation of new knowledge and transcend existing comprehension. To enable it, students should be encouraged to constantly experiment, speculate, reimagine, critique and contribute within the agendas of the design studio whilst consistently engaged with the wider world of ideas, issues and concerns beyond studio walls. As educators and practitioner- academics, how can we curate learning environments that perform as design studio ‘think-tanks’ that simultaneously addresses the speculative ambitions of the studio (and studio leader) whilst engaging with the practicalities of the real-world brief of the client and as well as the aspirations of various partners, collaborators and stakeholders? The ‘Learning Frontiers: RMIT Urban High School’ project is a series of research-led industry partnered studios – is used here as a point of reflection to unpack specific design studio pedagogical attributes and behaviours that developed whilst leading the project. The studios simultaneously explored two primary threads of investigations; ‘typological procedural experiments’ as a design practice and experimental propositions for high school learning environments.