Abstract
In this study, we conducted qualitative interviews with 13 students from historically excluded backgrounds who were enrolled in studio-based architecture, product design, and interior design programs at public university in the United States. Interviews revealed that students perceived faculty to be disconnected from today’s concerns about mental health and the financial realities of students. Students also did not feel that studio grading was fair. Professors were perceived as being too controlling of student projects, and students from historically excluded backgrounds experienced discriminatory treatment in studios and critiques. We discuss these findings through the lens of Critical Race Theory, arguing that the lack of inclusivity in design education is not only a threat to effective learning but also an example of systemic racism. Our findings underscore the need for more inclusive pedagogical approaches and better institutional support structures in design education.
Introduction
Ensuring that design teams reflect the diversity of user groups is important, yet most design fields in the United States are less diverse than the general population. The general population of the United States is 57.5% white, 20% Hispanic or Latino, 13.7% Black, 6.7% Asian, 3.1% two or more races, 1.4% Native American or Alaska Native, and 0.3% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (United Sates Census Bureau, nd). According to the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB), 84% are of the architects in the United States are white, 5% are Hispanic, 2% are Black, 6% are Asian, and 3% are from other backgrounds (National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, 2021). The membership of Industrial Designers Society of American (IDSA) is 70% white, 6% Hispanic/Latinx, 3% Black, 13% Asian, 2% multiracial, and 6% unreported (IDSA HQ, 2021). Both architecture and industrial design have not only an overrepresentation of non-Hispanic white people, but also an overrepresentation of men. IDSA members are only 27% women and architects are only 24% women (IDSA HQ, 2021; National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, 2021). Interior design has an overrepresentation of women in the lower ranks but not in top leadership roles, and members of the International Interior Design Association (IIDA) are 85% white (Designers Today Staff, 2023).
The demographics of professional fields do not tell the full story. In the year 2020 and in connection with the Black Lives Matter movement, design student organizations voiced concerns in a variety of ways, such as through open letters to college administrators and through Instagram posts, highlighting problems such as low retention rates of Black design students, lack of financial support for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) student groups, expensive course materials, lack of diversity in invited speakers, lack of BIPOC faculty, and curricula that fail to incorporate an anti-racist perspective, among other things. Design professionals echoed similar concerns and started similar movements, such as “Where are the Black Designers?”, a group founded to “support, amplify, and make space for the entire spectrum of Black creativity” (Where are the Black Designers?, 2020).
The concerns raised by design students focused on structural issues within the education system. Education researchers have similarly called for research that rejects deficit models, which focus on shortcomings within underrepresented groups, and instead places a focus on structural problems and solutions to address equity from the perspective of the curriculum (Martin et al., 2022; Mejia and Martin, 2023; Pawley, 2017). The present study aims to respond to these calls by centering design student perspectives and experiences and considering what they tell us about the surrounding educational context. We ask the central research question: How do student-faculty interactions impact the educational experiences of design students from historically excluded groups?
In this article, we present the findings of a qualitative study in which we interviewed university students majoring in architecture, interior design, and product design, a discipline which incorporates aspects of industrial design and user experience design. Design pedagogy is distinct from other university pedagogy as it involves a high level of personalized interaction between faculty and students. For example, in the United States, most university students refer to their professors using formal titles, but in design schools, it is more common for students to call professors by their first names and for professors to know all their students on a first name basis, as class sizes are frequently smaller than 20 students. Studio courses meet for more time than typical university courses (a typical architecture studio class may meet three times a week for four hours at a time (Cennamo, 2016)), and individual constructive feedback is central to studio pedagogy. Studio pedagogy has influence beyond the applied arts, as other disciplines have begun adopting studio pedagogy and incorporating it into their educational approaches (Gray, 2016). Thus, we assert that research related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) specific to design education is an area in need of more attention.
Literature review
Studio-based education
Design education, particularly in applied arts fields such as architecture and industrial design, typically follows a studio-based model (Cennamo, 2016; Jones et al., 2025). Studio-based learning has its origins in the German Bauhaus School of design in the early 1900s, and is now a central component of most western university-level design programs (Cennamo et al., 2011; Jones et al., 2025; St John and Suhendra, 2024). While slight variations have been introduced, the basic structure of studio model has remained largely unchanged since its introduction in early 18th century architectural education (Chiang et al., 2021). The studio has been conceptualized as a bridge between the professional community of practice and the academic community (Brandt et al., 2013). Studio is rooted in the apprenticeship model, where the educator is positioned as an “expert” and the educational studio is the place where the students practice (Jones et al., 2025). The central goal of studio-based education in art and design is teaching creativity as a process (Sawyer, 2018).
One key feature of studio education is project critiques, also called crits, which can take several forms, including desk crits, pin-ups, juries, and project reviews (Jones et al., 2025). Critiques are the primary means through which design students are meant to refine their knowledge in studio settings, and are a method of delivering both summative and formative feedback (Cennamo et al., 2011; Jones et al., 2025). During critiques, students present their design solutions, defend their decisions and explain their reasoning, and received feedback on their work from peers, faculty, and guest critics (Cennamo et al., 2011). Although one-on-one “desk critiques” are a common way that studio instructors coach students through their projects, in larger classes, studio instructors sometimes lack time to give one-on-one desk critiques to each student, and may use small group critiques instead (Brandt et al., 2013). While critiques can be valuable, they can also have harmful effects, such as making students feel like they are facing a “firing squad,” leading to demoralizing and stressful outcomes (Anthony, 1991; Day, 2013; Jones et al., 2025). Critiques can create an unbalanced power dynamic between the students and critics, in which critics impose onto students their own views of how things ought to be designed (Jones et al., 2025; McDonald and Michela, 2019; Webster, 2004). Students may thus end up tailoring their work to get a good reaction from the design jury instead of undertaking transformative learning (Webster, 2004). Furthermore, the learning value that students receive during large group critiques is often affected by their sense of self, so sometimes the verbal formative feedback ends up falling on deaf ears (Blair, 2007).
Student-instructor relationships in design education
In interviews with interior design students, relationships with peers and instructors were seen both as sources of support and impediments to progress (Smith, 2015). While some faculty members were seen as helpful, others were seen as difficult, and many students were concerned that grades were influenced by favoritism (Smith, 2013, 2015). Webster (2004) investigated student-instructor relationships in architectural education and found that students experienced three types of instructors: “the entertainer,” “the hegemonic overlord,” and the “liminal servant” (Webster, 2004). The liminal servant, who enthusiastically engaged with the students’ ideas and was interested in helping the student construct their own knowledge, was the only type of instructor that increased the students’ motivation for learning (Webster, 2004). In contrast, the “hegemonic overlord” acted in such a way to ensure that students conformed to the instructor’s preferences, imposing their own ideas onto the students’ projects and failing to recognize a need for students to construct their own learning (Webster, 2004). Boling et al. discuss the challenges of teaching studios in a way that focuses on imparting design character rather than solely focusing on skills or knowledge (Boling et al., 2020). While instructor-student relationships are an important part of studio-based education, little research investigates instructor-student relationships in higher education in general (Karpouza and Emvalotis, 2019), and particularly in design education (Webster, 2004).
Bias in design education
Multiple researchers have pointed out patterns in studio pedagogy that may work against the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion (Gray and Smith, 2016). One study found patterns of prejudicial behavior in the design critique format known as a design jury, where a panel of jurors gives feedback in response to a student presentation of their work. Jury panelists displayed a condescending attitude, lower expectations, and coddling behaviors toward women students. Panelists also interrupted Black students more often and gave them less feedback than other students (Frederickson, 1993). Another study of architectural education found a lack of women faculty, less support for women students, and patterns of gender-biased grading (De Graft-Johnson et al., 2005). Problematic gender dynamics continue to play a role in the fields of architecture and industrial design (Bartlett and Masta, 2023; Havenhand, 2004; Ronen, 2018). Bartlett and Masta found that industrial design podcasts contributed to the masculinization of the industrial design profession and the devaluing of women in the field. Ronen found that the product design industry expresses gender essentialism by promoting the idea that women designers are best positioned to understand women consumers; at the same time, a devaluation of women was persistent and unacknowledged (Ronen, 2018). Thus, any study investigating racial dynamics must take an intersectional approach that also considers the role of gender (Crenshaw, 1989). Intersectionality considers the ways that multiple social identities intersect to create systems of power and oppression. Beyond education, racial and gender bias have also been found in professional architecture workplaces (Anthony, 2001). The literature is clear that design education can be an environment which is not equitable for students from historically excluded backgrounds. In this paper, we define “equity” in design education as condition in which all students regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or socioeconomic status are able to equally access and benefit from design education without being asked to surrender their own unique identities.
Eurocentric design and decolonizing design
Design education can be seen as “Eurocentric,” or rooted in European and Western culture, history, standards, and norms while ignoring a wider view of the world. This phenomenon is not limited to design education, as the dominant discourse throughout the United States recognizes Eurocentric white culture as the prevailing educational standard and ignores the experiences of students of color (Savas, 2014). In design specifically, the ongoing focus on European design history implicitly communicates to students that white, Eurocentric design is the most important (Sales, 2021). Further, design education continues to follow the structure of the German Bauhaus and master-apprentice model, training students to create designs that conform to Western aesthetics and commercial practices (St John and Suhendra, 2024). Moses and Souza argue that academia houses “hurtful and Black-excluding design curricula…The story of design as something that happened in Europe in the 1800s excludes centuries of highly skilled making by Africans and the African diaspora” (Moses and Souza, 2023). Garbutt asserts that typographic design conventions are “what white men thought would look good to other white men that they wanted to sell type to,” reminding readers that “every aesthetic has an implied values system” (Garbutt, 2022). In a similar vein, Jones states that “the white space of design aesthetics reflects the white space of professional design worlds…a political choice intended to reinforce hierarchies which then became naturalized as simply ‘good design’ over time” (Jones, 2022).
Noel (2022) writes that making design education relevant will require “delinking it from its Eurocentrism and rooting it in local issues, cultures, and identities” (Noel, 2022: p. 289). This delinking can be referred to as “decolonizing design,” which advocates for putting indigenous first, dismantling the racist bias and tech bias in the European Modernist Project, making amends, and reprioritizing resources (Tunstall, 2023). “Decolonizing transcends diversity initiatives as it centers on identifying systems of exclusion as well as working to change them” (Hadjiyanni, 2020: p. 7). Noel argues that “the futures of design education will be pluriversal as we will learn to co-exist with many ways of doing design that draw on personal histories, a range of identities, localities, and a diversity of motives” (Noel, 2022: p. 289). The concept of a pluriverse comes from the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico (Dávila et al., 2023) and is central to Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse which argues for design’s transition toward plural ways of making the world (Escobar, 2018). Multiple authors have proposed pedagogical approaches for decolonizing design education and helping students and educators break away from “their ‘unconscious obedience’ to Eurocentric aesthetics and practices” (St John and Suhendra, 2024) (see also Angelon and Van Amstel (2021); MacGill (2023); Seeschaaf-Veres and Giuliano (2021)).
“Design Justice” is “a framework for analysis of how design distributes benefits and burdens between various groups of people” which “aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design benefits and burdens” (Costanza-Chock, 2020). The growing calls to decolonize design pedagogy are aligned with design justice principles, and there are many liberatory frameworks for design pedagogies such as pop ed, critical community technology pedagogy, participatory action design, data feminism, and more (Costanza-Chock, 2020).
Theoretical lens: Critical Race Theory
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a theory developed by legal scholars in the USA that highlights the importance of understanding the racialized context behind policies and viewing policies through their historical and cultural contexts (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017). A central principle of CRT is “recognizing the centrality of race and racism in shaping the everyday life experiences of all people, but especially for people of color” (Ledesma and Calderón, 2015). In education, CRT looks at the role of educational policies and practices in constructing racial inequality and perpetuating whiteness as a norm (Dixson and Rousseau Anderson, 2018). Critical Race Theory challenges traditional education research which imposes a white dominant ideology and largely ignores the experiences of students of color. Instead, CRT scholars in education seek to understand the lived experiences of students of color and place value on the knowledge that is shaped by these experiences (Savas, 2014). For example, at predominately white universities, Black students are treated differently from white students, receiving less recognition and support from faculty (Feagin et al., 1996), and facing racism, hostility, prejudice, institutional bias, negative stereotypes, self-doubt, isolation, and cultural insensitivity (Jones, 2001). Critical Race Theory scholars recognize that the pathway to attaining a college degree in the United States is not race-neutral. Due to historic and current policies that contribute to inequality along racial lines (structural racism), Black and Latino households in the United States are disproportionately concentrated in lower income levels, and because of residential segregation along racial and income lines, children from these communities grow up in less affluent neighborhoods where schools are often lower quality, making the pathway to college more difficult (Massey et al., 2003; Savas, 2014). College tuition is less affordable for students from historically excluded backgrounds than for white students (Savas, 2014). Beyond tuition, design programs include additional expenses for materials that can be burdensome for students from low-income backgrounds (Unif-ID, nd). The research project described in this paper is situated in CRT in that it centers and values the voices and experiences of students of color and considers the ways that historical and social context influences those experiences.
Author positionality
The four authors have a background in design and a common interest in improving design education to be welcoming to all students. Author one identifies as a white American heterosexual woman with a background in engineering and industrial design and teaches product design at the university level. Author two identifies as a South Asian American woman with a background in architecture and teaches interior design at the university level. Author three identifies as a South American homosexual male from a rural background and undergraduate architecture student. Author four identifies as a Southeast Asian American heterosexual female from an immigrant background and undergraduate architecture student.
At the time of the research study (spring 2024), author two was serving as the college’s first Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Since then, the university has removed all such job titles with the words “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion,” banned mandatory diversity trainings, and banned the use of diversity statements in hiring, as state lawmakers sought to ban essentially all DEI efforts at public colleges (Spitalniak, 2024; Swanz, 2025a). More recently, the University announced that student clubs related to “identity,” such as National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMAS), can no longer receive university funding, and the University cancelled all memberships to organizations considered to practice DEI, including the professional design organizations which many faculty and students were involved with (Swanz, 2025b). Despite the actions of the university, the author team continues to believe in the importance of research aimed at ensuring that design education is valuable and enriching for all students.
Methods
Setting
The research was conducted with students in the College of Design at an R1 (high research output) University in the central United States. The design majors included in the study were architecture, interior design, and product design. The faculty who teach in these programs are a combination of full-time tenure-track/tenured faculty who conduct research or creative scholarship alongside their teaching, lecturers who have a full-time focus on teaching, and part-time faculty who teach a single class while holding other jobs. The majority of courses in the college are taught by the full-time faculty. At the time of the research, majority of the faculty employed at the college were white Americans, though there were a few faculty of Middle Eastern, East Asian, South Asian, Hispanic or Latiné/a/o/x backgrounds.
Survey
Demographics of survey participants.
The survey respondents were also primarily undergraduate (90.5%), American (98.5%), non-first-generation college students (78.1%), and non-disabled (76.7%).
Interviews
A subgroup of survey respondents was invited to participate in interviews. Purposeful sampling was used to invite a group of students from historically excluded backgrounds from among the survey respondents to participate in the interviews. Thirteen students were interviewed in total. The first 11 interviews were conducted by pairs of one faculty member and one student research assistant, and the last two interviews were conducted by faculty only. The interviews lasted approximately 1 hour and were conducted primarily in person, with the last two conducted via video call.
The interviews were intentionally broad in nature. The planned interview questions were: What led you to choose design as your major? Can you tell the story of how you got to this point in your studies? Overall, how has your experience been as a design student? What have been the best and worst parts? How, if at all, do you feel that your identity has impacted your experience as a design student? How well do you feel that you fit into the culture of design in your department at this university? How well do you feel that you fit into the culture of design in general? If you were to create your own design education program targeting students like yourself, what are the biggest changes you would make compared to the design education that you have received so far? Is there anything else you would like to share with the research team? As is typical of qualitative interviews, various unplanned follow-up questions were also asked throughout. Additionally, participants were shown copies of three Instagram posts as examples of design student activism and asked about their perspectives on the posts, but that portion of the interviews is not discussed in the present work and will be discussed in future publications. All survey and interview activities followed a university-approved IRB protocol [University of Kentucky IRB # 92520] and participants were compensated for their time.
We have taken multiple steps to protect the anonymity of the participants, particularly since the participants were all from a single university. First, we are reporting the demographics of interview participants as a group rather than individually. Second, we have used pseudonyms for the interview participants in this paper and removed identifying details. We have also used more general identity terms than those some participants described themselves by, for example, a student may have described herself as a Mexican woman rather than a Latina woman. The interview participants included the following demographics: Asian (1), Black (4), Hispanic/Latiné/o/a/x (4), white (2), Hispanic/Latiné/o/a/x and white (2), men (6), women (7), undergraduate students (12), graduate students (1), heterosexual (10), gay (1), bisexual (2), architecture majors (9), interiors majors (2), and product design majors (2).
All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed using a professional transcription service. Then, members of the research team manually checked transcripts for accuracy and removed identifying information. We used thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2012) to code and analyze the interview content and the free-response survey content. Team members worked individually for a first pass of coding using an inductive approach, then the team came together to agree on a common set of codes. Our approach was very similar to the one reported in Ross et al. (2025), as we used the exploratory method of assigning preliminary codes that emerged in the interview transcripts rather than using a guiding theory to search for specific constructs (Ross et al., 2025; Saldaña, 2021). Each team member was instructed to read the transcripts and identify elements of the interviews that they found to be somehow relevant to diversity, equity, and inclusion in design education. We used Taguette software for the initial coding and to combine codes in a second pass after agreeing on the common set of codes. As each team member had made a first pass at coding individually, the common set of codes was determined by combining codes that had the same meaning but had been coded using different wording. The coding occurred at the transcript level, and each transcript was coded by at least two team members. Written survey responses were coded after the coding scheme was finalized, and the same codes were then applied to the written survey responses, as we viewed these responses as further evidence of the same themes that arose from the transcripts. Some quotes presented in this paper have been edited slightly for clarity and removal of pause words.
Results
While many different themes emerged during the interviews, the focus of the present work is on themes related to design pedagogy and student-faculty interactions. These themes included: faculty appearing out of touch with students’ current reality, students perceiving grading to be unfair and unclear, students feeling that the design professors were overly controlling of their projects, and students observing or experiencing discriminatory treatment in studios and critiques.
Theme 1: Faculty appeared out of touch with students’ current reality
The interviews revealed multiple elements in which the students found the studio faculty to be out of touch with their needs and realities. The first was regarding the value of mental and physical health. As design studio courses are lengthy courses that meet for as many as 12 hours a week, students were overwhelmed by the expectations of how many hours they were told to work outside of class on studio work, in addition to their other courses and other responsibilities like part-time jobs. Thus, the interviews revealed a mismatch in expectations between students and faculty members regarding working hours, which students described as a “toxic culture” of design school: My freshman year, I remember being told by a studio professor that we’re expected to work an additional 18 hours at minimum outside of the studio. So, when are we supposed to sleep? When are we supposed to eat? – Kelly (a Black woman) Teachers always expect us to do so much more than we possibly have time in the day. When am I supposed to sleep if I have to do all this work? – Natalie (a Latina woman)
One of the explanations for this behavior from professors appeared to be that the professors were recreating conditions that they had experienced as students in the past, such as sleeping in studio and skipping meals and showers. For example, Ahmed (an Asian man) expressed the following: I think personally the studio culture that our professor is preaching about is very toxic to one’s physical and mental health, because the other day, a professor was comparing his life to his students and how he sacrificed eating properly for printing a bulletin board when he was in school… And it seems like he was pushing to expect us to do the same thing. – Ahmed
Multiple survey respondents also echoed Ahmed’s idea. A white woman architecture student stated that, “there is no empathy from professors regarding mental health and financial situations. It is a totally different world than it was ‘back in their day’ and they need to open their eyes.” Survey respondents were especially concerned about observing other students pull multiple all-nighters in a row, which they considered very unhealthy: Many of the students said how they felt sick from not sleeping and eating because of getting their project done and ready for their final review. – Survey response, white woman architecture student
Ahmed’s roommate, a computer science student, was shocked when he visited Ahmed’s studio at midnight on a Sunday and found it filled with design students working on their projects. As computer science is known to be a difficult major, Ahmed wondered why design students were expected to dedicate more hours to their coursework than students from other difficult majors. Kelly (a Black woman) felt that the design professors’ unreasonable time expectations stemmed in part from their high demand for iteration, and their belief that it was never too late to pivot a design idea. She said, It is psychotic thinking that students have the time to create 40 and 60 sketches a week just to appease you. It is psychotic thinking to think that somebody can just scrap a project four and five weeks into the semester and redo it. – Kelly
Besides issues of physical and mental health, students also felt that faculty were out of touch with students’ financial constraints. Professors expected students to pay high printing costs to print posters of their projects for a single design review and to pay for expensive model-making materials. Janelle (a Black woman) recounted an experience where one of her professors required students to spend $100 on printing for a single review, knowing that the posters would be hung for a few only hours, and her work would be discussed for 25 minutes or less: I can say that [Professor’s name] was one of the more frustrating studio professors, because he has no sense of money, and he doesn’t care. He doesn't care about money. Because the whole printing thing… I don't understand how you think it would ever be feasible for anybody to spend $100 on printing, especially when you’re going to tear it down and throw it away afterwards. – Janelle
Janelle eventually had to take it upon herself to confront the professor when it became clear that others also could not afford the $100 printing but no one else was willing to speak up. She was met with a condescending reaction from the professor. The $100 printing was not an isolated case, as Jennifer reported spending up to $150 on printing for a single review. Jessica (a Latina woman) felt lucky that her parents were able to help her afford printing, as she knew that was not the case for all students, but she was still frustrated that she had to ask them.
Working long hours and paying high material costs was especially challenging for students who worked part-time jobs. At the time of the interview, Ahmed was working 50 hours per week (split between multiple jobs) but had previously worked as many as 70 hours per week, requiring him to wake up at 4:00 am and finish his day at 10:00 pm. As Natalie was already working all day on schoolwork, she donated plasma for extra money since it did not take as much time. She said, My dad pays for school and so I have to pay for all my expenses, living, eating, all those…The only way I eat is by donating plasma. I get $50 twice a week and so I get $100 a week and that’s how I buy my groceries. – Natalie
The final area in which faculty appeared out of touch with students’ current realities was with their incorporation of contemporary cultural issues. Two survey respondents brought this up. A white woman architecture student argued that the faculty need to “value the emotions and voices of younger generations” and consider how to address “their desires to learn how to build a better future.” She thought courses should cover topics like ethics, sustainability, social issues, and the problematic history of architecture. Another white woman student agreed that “real, current issues are all but ignored” in the architecture curriculum. This survey respondent explained that one result of the “harsh conditions and expectations set by faculty members” was that they have “fostered a community based in a trauma-bond type of relationship among the students.” Another survey respondent echoed that fact that “it’s kind of trauma bonding that makes us students all so close.”
Theme 2: Students perceived grading to be unclear and unfair
Another consistent theme from the interviews and survey was the feeling that grading in studio courses was subjective, not clearly explained, and based on whether or not the professors liked you. A white woman architecture student wrote in a survey response, Grading should be looked at and standardized especially for studio. Professors have too much liberty in grading and do not always view the grading scale the same way. Grades should not be a surprise and not just a conversation at midterm and final with little-to-no explanation.
Paul (a Latino man) expressed a struggle with understanding why the professors did or did not like his work: When I try to do something, then I show the professor, and I explain why I did it. They’re like, “I’d do something else.” I’m like, “Can you tell me why?” And they just say, “it doesn’t make sense,” or they’re not really specific with it, they just tell me to do something else and try to figure it out for myself. – Paul
Kelly stated that the fact that studio was “very subjective” was one of her “biggest problems with studio.” Jennifer shared that she had “no clue how grading is decided, absolutely none.” Natalie similarly did not understand why she received the grades she did, and assumed it was based on the professor’s dislike of her work: I hope I have an “A” or I hope I have a “B.” I’d never know. I’m just hoping that they like my things to get the good grade. Because it’s all biased… My worst grade that I got was a “C” with [Faculty member], and I just assumed that it was because he hated everything that we did and none of it was good. I had no idea because he didn't like any of our stuff that we were doing. – Natalie
Ahmed observed that students often did not agree with the grades that they and their classmates received, especially knowing how much effort went into some of the work. Ahmed said: I think students can see effort. And we all spent countless hours in the building together working, so they’ve seen effort being put in. And if their professor just doesn’t like you, then just kind of makes it like, “What’s the point of all the effort?” – Ahmed
Tim, a Black man, similarly expressed frustration about the fact that “design is so subjective.” Tim reported an upsetting experience in which a friend of his had been accused of plagiarism in a design course, yet neither Tim nor the friend agreed that the plagiarism charge was justified.
A student research assistant agreed that studio grading was consistently unclear. Unlike in seminar courses, where instructors provided rubrics and supported grades with explanatory comments, studio professors did not provide rubrics or written comments explaining grades. Studio faculty were required to provide a midterm grade, which was the only form of feedback students received besides the final grade. Students typically learned of these grades by checking them through the university’s online system, which did not display the grades until a time when most students felt it was too late to try to discuss the grade with the professor. One of the reasons that students were frustrated by studio grading was the fact that many scholarships at this university were GPA-based, and studio courses were 5-6 credit hours, meaning they had an outsized impact on GPA in comparison to other courses. Students feared losing their scholarships because of studio grades.
Theme 3: Students felt that the design professor was controlling their projects
Another theme that emerged was students’ frustration with the level of control that the professors exerted over their projects. This led to frustration, confusion, and a lot of extra work for the students. In light of the perception of subjective grading, students felt that they had little choice but to follow the professor’s direction about how their design projects should be carried out. Paul, a Latino man, felt that students did not have the freedom to execute their design projects the way they wanted to, because the faculty pushed their own ideas on students. Paul said, Some teachers, they basically tell you what to do like, “I would do this and this,” and it doesn’t really give you freedom of what you would do. They kind of push you to what they want to do, or what they want to see. – Paul
Paul felt that when professors told him to change direction, the professors weren’t able to clearly explain the reasoning behind what was wrong with the design and why it needed to be changed. Ahmed had a similar experience where he was pushed to completely change his project: My professor made me restart my project. It was due this Wednesday; he made me restart last Friday. So, an entire semester’s worth of work, completely redone in less than 72 hours. – Ahmed
When asked why he thought the professor had made him restart the project, Ahmed replied that he did not know: I have no idea, and it’s odd. At this point, I think a lot of students have realized that their projects are not their own. It becomes their professor’s towards the end. It starts out as their own, but as they progress, it becomes their professor’s. Your original ideas may or may not be there anymore. And it’s just kind of like you pick and choose what you liked from what your professor has recommended, but it’s not your original idea, the one you actually wanted to do. That’s kind of how it goes. And I feel like students are too afraid to push back, because I tell everyone that our grades are kind of dependent on whether the professor likes you or not. I feel like it very much is, and I think other students would agree with me. So, it’s like we kind of just have to conform to what our professor wants, whether we want it or not, for our own project. – Ahmed
Ahmed and the student research assistant agreed that the professors don’t like it when students ignore their suggestions and would sometimes express this through passive-aggressive comments toward students. However, not all professors behaved this way. Ahmed explained how the best professors guided students by trying to understand their ideas and showing them helpful examples to support their direction: The good professors never push down your idea or enforce their ideas. Let’s say I have an idea to make this crazy staircase or something. I just kind of sketch it out and show my professor. She’d be like, “Oh!” And that professor I’m thinking of in particular, she’d find a precedent. She knows precedent right away. Like, “Oh, it’s kind of like this! Maybe you could take some inspiration from this. Figure out how this one works, and then you can replicate it,” which is, I feel, how it should be. – Ahmed
Here, Ahmed touched on a theme which was brought up by multiple survey respondents, that was the variation among professors. While students found some professors very helpful, supportive, and likable, other professors were perceived as unfair graders who showed favoritism and controlled student project directions without explaining why or teaching effectively.
Theme 4: Students experienced discriminatory treatment during critiques and studios
The final theme that emerged from the interviews was the observation and experience of discriminatory treatment in studio courses and during design critiques. During studio courses, professors typically circle the room and provide feedback in the form of “desk crits” where they speak with students individually at their desks. Foundational to studio culture is also the design review or design critique, when students present their work in front of a panel of jurors for feedback. The panelists may be other faculty members from the college, industry professionals, or other project stakeholders. Our participants observed discriminatory treatment during these activities, especially toward Black and/or women students.
Jennifer once observed the review of a Black male classmate who was a non-traditional student, an older parent. The student had missed 2 weeks of class to care for a sick child during the COVID-19 pandemic. The professor went on to embarrass the student with harsh criticism during the review, even though the professor knew that the student had been unable to complete the work to the best of his ability due to his family situation. Jennifer had other friends of color who shared similar experiences. Jennfier had also witnessed faculty misgender students and not utilize students’ chosen pronouns during studio interactions. Jennifer also observed that women design students did not receive as positive feedback as men students when presenting work of equal or higher quality. She said: I’ve noticed as a woman specifically on reviews, a lot of the panels I’ve been in have been predominantly men on the panel. And I’ve seen people maybe put forth, I’m not trying to dog anyone’s project, but I've seen a guy put forth a project that was pretty cool, pretty good, maybe didn’t have as much thought to it, and I’ve seen the reviewers say the guy knocked it out of the park…And then I’ve seen women come up with a great project that’s equally as good, if not better, and really beautifully empathetically thought about. And reviewers are like, “It was good. It was good.” I feel like I've seen a lot of men have trouble handing out a compliment to a woman who did a good job on a project. It’s like we have to make sure women are humbled. – Jennifer
Jennifer had the sense that the college had a culture of allowing the objectification of women, as she had observed inappropriate interactions between male faculty and staff members and younger women students. She had also experienced an incident of sexual harassment on a field trip to a design firm. Despite that incident, the professor leading the trip still held the offending design professional in high regard. Kelly agreed that women design students faced harsher feedback and said that most women students agreed that they had to work twice as hard as some of their men classmates, yet “still did not get the same level of respect and care during and outside of reviews.” Janelle had a woman classmate who dropped out of the program because a professor was being especially harsh on her, and had said to her, “I’m not going to let up, because you’re going to be pushed even harder because you’re a woman in this field.” Although Janelle believed the professor was well-intentioned, the fact that her friend had dropped out was not a positive outcome.
Instead of getting harsh or negative feedback, some Black women students also reported getting superficial or unhelpful feedback, which was discouraging. For example, Maya felt that professors tiptoed around her and did not truly engage with her work: I feel like I am somewhat neglected, if that makes sense, because you would sometimes see people get help and their help would be in detail, a lot more information, and then when it comes to me, it’s like lessened and it’s sweet and nice and it’s all nice things, but is it good? We all know that no design is perfect, but the feedback is not as helpful when it’s only nice…And I’m like, “I know there's something wrong with my project. I know that there’s something wrong. There could be something else said, but why aren’t you saying it?” – Maya
Maya felt that she was treated differently because she was Black, sometimes being tokenized or included in activities just because of her race: It’s a little uncomfortable because I feel like a quota sometimes. I’m getting certain things because I’m Black and that they want me to feel included, but do I actually deserve them? Is there someone else that deserves them more than I do? I’m a hard worker, so I want to get things that I know that I deserve, not something just because of my skin tone, which was a little uncomfortable. – Maya
Kelly felt neglected as well. One of the ways this manifested was that some professors and teaching assistants had mixed her up with other Black women classmates. Another Black student, Janelle, reported having a similar experience, suggesting that this was somewhat of a pattern in the college. Kelly had accepted early on in her design studies that she would never get the same level of feedback as her peers. Kelly’s professors spoke with other students in the class for over an hour during desk critiques, leaving little to no time to talk to her. Experiences like this made Kelly even more frustrated about receiving lower grades than she felt her work deserved.
Janelle called out a specific problem with design review panels—they were usually not diverse, leaving students of color feeling like they had to prove themselves in addition to presenting and defending their work. Janelle reported a recent experience where all her reviewers were white men with the exception of one non-white woman faculty member. Janelle shared: Just having to talk to white men feels like a challenge. I feel like they’re going to challenge you because you’re different, whereas you’re not going to have that issue if you were someone of the same background. I don’t know if it’s true… it feels like you are not only trying to explain your project, but you’re also trying to get through this debate of why you’re actually here trying to prove yourself or something every single time that you have a reviewer that is a white man. Every single time it feels like you also have to argue why you’re here and say that you have a place here and that’s utter bullshit. That’s so fucking stupid. – Janelle
Janelle was sure that the other students of color felt the same way as she did when facing all-white review panels. The student research assistants, also students of color, agreed.
Discussion
Our study revealed several areas in which studio-based design education fell short for all students, particularly for students from historically excluded backgrounds. First, the faculty appeared to be out of touch with students’ current reality, making decisions that impacted the students’ physical and mental health, as well as putting financial strain on the students. Multiple participants felt that faculty members were attempting to re-create their own experiences of design education in the past, re-creating a situation where pulling all-nighters to get projects done and skipping meals to pay for design materials was normalized. The participants did not believe that these practices were appropriate in today’s design education. They wished that the faculty members were more in touch with their generation’s emphasis on mental health, physical well-being, and attention to social issues such as anti-racism and sustainability, which the students saw as clearly relating to design disciplines like architecture. While one impact of these experiences was that some students experienced a close community with each other, multiple people described this experience as one of “trauma bonding” rather than fostering relationships for chosen reasons. Today’s design students not only want to learn about how design is connected to contemporary social issues that they care about, but they also want the faculty to understand how their pedagogical decisions affect students’ well-being and make decisions that foster a healthy lifestyle for learners. The faculty actions are also a threat to equity, as by asking students to pay for expensive supplies and printing costs out of pocket, the faculty create a scenario in which students who are more financially well-off can afford to deliver higher quality design outputs.
The idea that faculty teach studios in the same way that they themselves were taught is not new, and is found in other literature on studio pedagogy (Jones et al., 2025). The exhausted, overworked studio student is unfortunately not a new finding either (Anthony, 1991). Yet, while faculty may not be evolving their approaches to studio, our findings indicate that the current generation of students may be more attuned to issues of mental health and less willing to accept these practices as a necessary part of becoming a designer. The fact that students want their studio education to be more connected to the social issues that they care about suggests that many students in our study would likely be receptive to some of the emerging pedagogical approaches designed to connect student identities to their design work (Angelon and Van Amstel, 2021; MacGill, 2023; St John and Suhendra, 2024). One finding that we did not see echoed in other academic literature, but is brought up in a report created by a practicing industrial designer (Unif-ID, nd), is the fact that the additional costs for printing and prototyping materials were so burdensome. Multiple interviewees of color, such as Ahmed, Janelle, and Natalie, discussed this financial hardship in depth, and given the fact that students from non-white backgrounds are more likely to face difficulties in paying for college (Savas, 2014), the cost burdens of design course materials appear particularly salient for these students. This is a clear threat to equity, as students from wealthier backgrounds are unlikely to have a problem with costs that arise throughout the semester.
The second theme we identified was that students perceived studio grading to be unclear, unfair, and very subjective. Multiple participants had the impression that the reason for receiving low grades was either because the professor did not like their work or was biased against them. Ahmed found the grading particularly difficult to digest given the number of hours that students typically spent on projects, and that these grades did not align with students’ perceptions of effort. This finding is similar to Smith’s interviews of interior design students, who also believed grades to be based on favoritism and/or professors’ stylistic preferences (Smith, 2013, 2015). This issue was not isolated to students of any particular racial background. However, given that students of color routinely experience racism in university settings (Feagin et al., 1996; Jones, 2001; Savas, 2014; Wong et al., 2021), we must consider the outsized demoralizing impact that perceptions of grading being based on favoritism can have for students of color who believe that their white professors are biased against them in grading. Our findings indicate that by assigning grades without ensuring that students understand the rationale behind them, studio professors are opening themselves up to being seen by students as racially biased, regardless of whether or not racial bias played a role in grading. Furthermore, when students perceive grades to be disconnected from their actual work, grades are likely to act as a demotivating factor and diminish learning (Smith, 2013).
Further complicating the situation surrounding grading was our next theme, that students felt that design professors could be overly controlling of their design projects. For example, Paul felt that he did not have freedom to execute design projects the way he wanted to, and professors pushed his project in a certain direction without making it clear to him why that direction was better. In this sense, our participants were experiencing what Webster (2004) called the “hegemonic overlord” type of professor, who was focused on reproducing design students in their own image in a way that was unhelpful to student learning. The idea that professors’ tastes control project outcomes and grades is inevitably true, as design instructors use critiques to uphold what they see as the standards of the discipline (McDonald and Michela, 2019). In design schools like the setting of our study, where the faculty are majority white, studio faculty are likely reinforcing a white default through the type of design work that they are curating from the students, even if they are doing so unconsciously. The Eurocentric nature of design pedagogy is not exclusive to majority white institutions, but is likely to have an outsized impact on students from non-European backgrounds, as they experience a design education where they are being molded into creating design work that does not feel authentic to their identities and stylistic choices. While not exclusive to Black students, the mismatch between design professors’ preferences and student identity is clearly echoed in many essays by Black designers and educators (Berry et al., 2022; Moses and Souza, 2023).
Finally, our last theme indicated that students from certain backgrounds, especially women, Black students, and most of all Black women students, were experiencing discriminatory treatment during studios and critiques. Our findings suggest a pattern of men and non-Black students getting more helpful feedback from faculty than women and Black students were. This included feedback during studio, feedback during formal critiques, and the lack of explanation surrounding their grades. These women students and Black students experienced getting less helpful feedback, either in the form of shorter or overly positive feedback that resembled coddling. Since feedback from professors and jurors is one of the primary learning mechanisms in studio education, the fact that some populations of students do not get equally helpful feedback is highly concerning. Our findings indicate that design knowledge is not being distributed in an equitable way. In other cases, women’s feedback was less positive than their men peers, whose feedback was longer and involved more praise. Being on the receiving end of overly negative feedback can also hinder a student’s ability to learn from the critique (Blair, 2007).
Our findings echoed those of Frederickson’s study of design juries who similarly found that Black students and women students received shorter and less useful feedback (Frederickson, 1993). Given the concept of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), it is unsurprising that students who hold multiple minoritized identities would be the most harmed by the educational structure. While Frederickson’s study is now decades old, Critical Race Theory rejects the standard “racial progress” narrative that suggests that the race relations in the United States are continuously improving (Dixson and Rousseau Anderson, 2018). Our findings suggest that this “racial progress” is not happening when it comes to studio pedagogy, which continues to perpetuate many of the same issues that have been discussed for decades. Critical Race Theory holds that racism is systemic, embedded not just in individual prejudices but in institutions themselves, and our findings point out multiple structural issues at play that impact all students, but may have an outsized impact on students from historically excluded backgrounds.
Though the primary focus of this paper is to discuss the problems that our participants brought up regarding faculty-student interactions, we note that participants made it clear that not all faculty demonstrated these problems in their teaching. In fact, many participants named specific faculty who did a good job supporting student learning and fostering a positive studio environment. They also named faculty who did a good job giving clear grading feedback by using rubrics, though these tended to be non-studio faculty. These good teachers motivated the students to be more excited about design and to keep progressing in their studies.
Limitations
One limitation of this study is that we were not able to confirm the transcripts with participants, which would have been more ideal in this qualitative study. This study focused on a single university, and studying other universities may yield different insights. Additionally, the small number of students from historically excluded racial backgrounds at this university meant that our group included students from multiple design disciplines, yet students from interior design and product design were less represented than architecture, so our findings may be most applicable to architecture education. Finally, this study represents a US context, and Critical Race Theory was developed specifically in a US context, so some of our ideas in this paper may be less applicable to design education in other countries.
Conclusion
Our findings suggest that many design students are not experiencing the studio classroom as an inclusive place. Instead, our findings suggest that students from historically excluded backgrounds may be reaping less benefit from faculty relationships and receiving less helpful feedback than white and male students, echoing findings from much older studies (Frederickson, 1993; Webster, 2004). Students were frustrated when faculty created environments failed to support mental health or general well-being and expected students to pay for materials that they could not afford. Students perceived faculty to grade in non-transparent ways and hold too much influence over student projects, upholding Eurocentric design norms and seeking to reproduce the same education that they once received. While many of these issues impacted students from all backgrounds, they are likely to have an outsized impact on students from historically excluded racial backgrounds, who experience additional exclusionary dynamics and barriers while attending a majority white university. Critical Race Theory holds that racism is systemic and embedded in institutions and questions the “racial progress” narrative. Given that little has changed in some of these problematic areas of design education over the decades, our findings suggest that design education needs fundamental structural changes in order to better serve the needs of all students. Future articles will expand on recommendations and pedagogical approaches for addressing the issues and disparities identified through this qualitative research study.
Footnotes
Ethical considerations
All study activities were approved by the University of Kentucky IRB, and all participants gave informed consent.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study received funding from UNITE at the University of Kentucky.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.
Data Availability Statement
The data from this study is not available to be shared because we do not have participant consent to share the interview data.
Additional survey questions
The following questions were presented on a 5-point Likert scale with the possible answers being: strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, neutral, somewhat agree, strongly agree. The wording throughout the survey would say “architecture,” “interiors,” or “product design” depending on the respondent’s major. The word architecture is italicizedwherever this was the case.