A preliminary comparison of desk and panel crit settings in the design studio

© 2015, The Design Society. All rights reserved. 'Desk Crit' has been described as the most important critique setting for teaching design. This approach has been shown to be beneficial in providing different perspectives on design problems to students and bridging to professional practice. However, some issues may be envisaged in this style. In this paper, we try to address these issues by adopting a panel based critique setting named 'Panel Crit' in a second year product design studio. The 'Panel Crit' setting is then compared with the 'Desk Crit' setting through a questionnaire and a structured interview with 16 students. The survey protocol is based on an evaluation of teaching survey and consists of 12 close-ended and three open-ended questions. The protocol compares the critique styles across four dimensions: communication, learning, feedback and satisfaction. The preliminary results reveal the effectiveness of a panel-based critique in providing unambiguous feedback, avoiding multiple presentations and increasing time efficiency during studio sessions. However, our results confirm previous research findings which highlight the importance of 'Desk Crit' in conveying fundamental design skills, introducing students to design practice and showing practitioner's approaches to design problems. We believe our findings could contribute to the understanding of how critique settings impact student's learning experience in design studio.