Learning from Lasso: Team spirit and the intangible impact of atmosphere on studio culture in design education

Pre-2020, university students learned with security, safety and a degree of predictability in communities rooted deeply in higher education buildings. Covid displaced and dissolved these communities overnight. For design, where a meeting of minds in a creative setting was paramount, students were confined to airless rooms, manifesting within squares on a screen. Boxes within boxes. The slow recovery of confidence is now underway but an understandable ambivalence, increased social anxiety and an ongoing demand for flexible, hybrid learning patterns threaten to reduce the need for physical environments in design education.

While the demise of high street retail required experiential interventions to restore footfall, design education studios similarly need to offer more than just a space to learn. Over 100 years ago Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, Germany, recognised that a successful learning experience was dependant on more than either the architecture or a radical new curriculum, stating “it was the atmosphere”1. A more recent worldwide study, ‘Designing Design Education’, conducted by the iF Design Foundation, proposed that a successful learning environment in design “requires an atmosphere that offers students a safe space and strengthens their self-belief”2. So how is this created, measured and evaluated? From reflections of online workshops with the Bauhaus, Dessau during lockdown to implementing lessons learnt from the globally recognised feel-good success story of ‘Ted Lasso’, we show how we can empower design students by creating a positive, inclusive atmosphere based on a combination of environment and personality to ensure personal and professional success.

1. MacCarthy, F. (1972). All things bright and beautiful: design in Britain: 1830 to today. London, Allen and Unwin.
2. Boeninger, C., Frenkler F. Schmidhuber S. and Spitz R. (2021) Designing Design Education: Whitebook on the Future of Design Education. Stuttgart, av edition GmbH.