As I prepare for the Bachelor of Commerce Sauder D-Studio this Fall, it has been useful to ponder what is most important about this new offering at the Sauder School of Business. Is it that we will be exploring how design thinking can value-add to business? Or is it experimenting with a new learning environment — the studio? Probably both.
The design studio is a place where students learn design process and collaborative working methods in an action environment. In other words the learning happens through doing. Typical studios where students are assigned desks and inhabit them for a term or even a year can be very intensive working environments. In the case of the Sauder D-Studio (especially this year when we are in swing space) students will be inhabit the space only for the 3 hours of the studio. So some of that intensity and development of the bonded family unit will be less.
D-Studio at Stanford -- they have since moved to new digs but you get the idea of a studio space
At Oxford's SAID Business School -- turning a classroom into a studio -- sort of!
By transferring the studio learning model to the business school, we are suggesting that there is much to be gained in terms of business education by increasing the amount of learning by practicing, doing, making and engaging in collaborative work. This is not to say that there isn’t already a lot of team work in the business school environment. There is. But it tends to be an after class-time add-on and the team work certainly isn’t the focus of the learning activity.
I was particularly struck by a recent Harvard Business School article by Richard Barker: No, Management is NOT a Profession. His main point is that some business skills can’t be taught in a classroom. They have to be learned through experience. He makes the point around integration:
The key here is to recognized that integration is not taught but learned. It takes place in the minds of the students rather than in the content of program modules. The students themselves link the various elements of the program. Thus it is vital that business schools understand themselves primarily as learning environments where individuals develop attributes, rather than as teaching environments, where students are presented with a body of functional and technical content.
I will return to the Barker article in a future blog.
But it struck me that the studio can contribute to the idea of developing attributes and setting up an experience where students can connect the disparate dots (content/knowledge) for themselves.