The nature of the educational practice of many design programs has led us, as an academic discipline, to rely heavily on our physical studio spaces. Communication and collaboration are key skills that are required from design students in the development of their project work. The physical studio provides a teaching, practice and social space where students can work individually or collaboratively, as required on their various practice-based assignments.

Pressures to adapt our teaching practice presents a unique opportunity for educators to again evaluate and define the role that educational spaces have in our programmes, how we use them to build engagement and foster our students' development. We can’t ignore lessons and new modes of working we’ve encountered during pandemic closures and as such we should identify which new paradigms need to be integrated to create engaging studio spaces for this next generation of design students.

The Open Studio project aims to work with student practitioners through co-creation methods to develop Open Source tools, plans and workshops to allow student practitioners to engage with and develop their educational spaces.