ACADEMIA Letters Liberating Design Education after Corona Days lerzan aras Year 2020 will mostly be remembered with Covid-19 pandemic and isolation times at homes. No one was prepared to such an extraordinary situation; and all education systems had to be adjusted to this force majeur situation. While staying at home and trying to keep ourselves safe, we also embraced technology more than ever, and tried to use its advantages to its highest capacity. Especially for the young generation, who were obliged to continue their education at home, its importance became undeniable. During this period design education with its well-known and accepted rules had also to re examine its traditional nature and adjust itself to new interactions in a very short period. The outcome of this ‘urgent learning platform’ will be evaluated through time in terms of students’ attitude, success, and their creativity; and some lessons will be learned. Among all disciplines, design education puts face to face interactions and challenging studio environments in the centre most, where students and tutors address a problem, analyse and eventually solve it together. The bond between the educator and the student is essential and creates a balance during the whole design process. This process continues with interactive face to face discussions; and the more they share, the more creative solutions can be put as outcome. Over many years many different methods were suggested to improve the quality of the education, but the basic remained untouched: Face to face interaction makes the difference. But during isolation times, every design school had to find ways to continue the education; especially for applied courses which were really more than difficult to conduct without face to face interaction. Although many theories and applications related to informal education have been experienced so far, it has never been an issue for design education until pandemic. Like all design schools in the world, Faculty of Architecture in European University of Lefke also tried to adjust itself to the new circumstances in a short time; and advanced online learning platforms with their synchronously designed systems have been opened to students Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: lerzan aras, lerzanaras@gmail.com Citation: Aras, L. (2021). Liberating Design Education after Corona Days. Academia Letters, Article 670. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL670. 1 and educators. The circumstances were unfamiliar, and blurry. Instead of crowded studio atmospheres, lots of paper drawings and print outs, we found ourselves sitting in front of screens, talking through microphones and looking at CAD drawings which we couldn’t touch, couldn’t draw on and we started to explore the world of digital systems deeply. This hard, unexpected and exhausted period was experienced from different angles by every design student. For some students, this period was a life in a vacuum and total decrease of concentration; whereas by some students it was accepted as a tolerable time and they even cherished some parts of it for using their working time more efficiently and effectively. Despite its departure from the traditional system like face to face discussion, feeling the studio atmosphere and sharing knowledge with friends; this new and unfamiliar virtual reality started to break boundaries, and created its own patterns, which were based on intense communication through synchronous classes, more internet research, and more visual sharing. After a short while all apprehensions and hesitations gave way to new and hopeful expectations. Although this online platform is a temporary substitution for regular and strictly defined design education system, new parameters enabled us to think more optimistic about new and hybrid systems. So, the main question will be: While adjusting to a new ‘normal’ what can be learned and adapted to design education, and what can be the attributes of this new system? Online education changes the main task of the educator. The educator has to take more responsibilities than ever to make virtual studio atmosphere as real and effective as possible. It is not only about solving a design problem inside the secure walls of a studio. When you have to find quick and effective solutions for emergency times, you have to focus on more issues than these, and it is time for keeping your mind clear, healthy, concentrated and ready to adjust to a new system. Also in informal environments, the instructors have a responsibility to find content that resonates with the groups being taught. While this may sound like an easy task, it is no doubt fraught with uncertainty. Online learning environments should attend to emotional connections (Schwier and Seaton, 2013). Also the educator should be ready for all possible distractions. Muilenburg and Berge found 8 factors which determine student’s barriers to online learning. The eight factors they found were: administrative issues, social interaction, academic skills, technical skills, learner motivation, time and support for studies, cost and access to the internet, and technical problems (Muilenburg and Berge, 2005). But these determinants are for a planned and carefully organized informal education system. In contrast to regular informal course flows, the design courses have totally different arrangements. In 2020 during pandemic days it was not easy to convert to informal systems very quickly and there was no time for adjustment. Both students and educators had to adapt in a very short period. And Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: lerzan aras, lerzanaras@gmail.com Citation: Aras, L. (2021). Liberating Design Education after Corona Days. Academia Letters, Article 670. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL670. 2 beside the 8 factors mentioned above, ‘the psychological needs’ and the ‘nature of isolation environment’ were added to the barrier. It was no longer just a period for education; it was also a time for recovery, safety, and adjustment to a new world under isolation. This period taught us a lot. Using design like a ‘therapeutic touch’ became the key of the process. First we realized that surprisingly the studio education system is something replaceable, and that face to face interaction can convert its conventional meaning to ‘screen talks’. It enabled us to reach more people simultaneously, and discuss topics more easily and quickly. We noticed that the open ended and solution oriented directions of design education could liberalize students outside the studio atmosphere more. No matter how challenging the circumstances are, the students found ways to detach themselves from external distractions with the help of designing; which had a positive impact on their design. It was an interesting observation to see that the communications through online systems are more carefully conducted and suitable platforms for discussions. Then we started to think how to transfer the challenges from COVID-19 experience to future education systems. A high level of social responsibility and personal endeavour, which was expressed by both students and teachers for the duration of pandemic enabled an identification of design challenges (performance, innovation, alteration, and inclusion) (Milovanovic et al, 2020); and it also gave us the opportunity to think of new pathways of how to re-shape the design education, or at least to discuss it. As teachers we recognize design as a process, and we must be prepared to reflectively engage students in ways that involve them in this complexity. Movement, change, dialogue, frustration, unknowns, and subjectivity are all aspects of the design process that must be considered as part of the design act, along with known understandings such as aesthetic meaning and form (Vaikla-Poldma, 2003); and during Covid-19 isolation days, this complexity gained other dimensions. While passing through hard days, without having any chance to predict the future, we saw that ‘old’ can have some ‘new’ substitutions, or at least there will be opportunities in future to discuss on. So, when these days are over, and we go back to studio environments, we have to think of new ways of liberation and this emergency system will not be forgotten. This liberation can come with 6 different attributes: 1. Using technology more intensively not just for beautiful computer drawings and project presentations; but also for communication, network connections, and distribution of data, 2. Finding ways to connect people from outside world with students in more flexible ways, to discuss different needs and expectations of societies in the new world order, Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: lerzan aras, lerzanaras@gmail.com Citation: Aras, L. (2021). Liberating Design Education after Corona Days. Academia Letters, Article 670. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL670. 3 3. Creating bridges between users and academia, involving them more to design process for a re-generative design, 4. Finding ways to encourage cross –disciplinary studies in undergraduate education to explore new possibilities in shaping the design environment according to new needs, 5. Supporting studio environments with extracurricular activities, using different communication tools, and keeping them open-ended, 6. Engaging students more in social and worldwide effective+changing (and maybe unpredictable) circumstances by creating new curricula including entrepreneurship opportunities. The growing interest in new concepts evolving from other disciplines including environmental psychology, disaster psychology, public health, biophilia and engagement with nature—should be integral to new design teaching practices (Salama and Crosbie, 2020). In this way we can liberate the design education from inflexibility, hard and acknowledged canon and practices, and adapt it to the future requirements of the society. We can say that the design education has found a chance to liberate itself from studio atmospheres. Maybe, in future more developments will open new ways to more mixed, more adjusted and more tolerable systems and it is ironic that this ‘thought of liberalization’ somehow happened under strict isolation. Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: lerzan aras, lerzanaras@gmail.com Citation: Aras, L. (2021). Liberating Design Education after Corona Days. Academia Letters, Article 670. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL670. 4 References Milovanovic, A., Kostic, M., Zoric, A., Dordevic, A., Pesic, M., Bugarski, J., Todorovic, D., Sokolovic, N., Josifovski, A. (2020). Transferring COVID-19 challenges into learning potentials: Online workshops in architectural education. Sustainability, 12(7024); doi:10.3390/su12177024, pp. 1-21. Muilenburg, L. Y. and Berge, Z. L. (2005). Student barriers to online learning: A factor analytic study. Distance Education, 26(1), pp. 29–48. doi: 10.1080/01587910500081269. Salama, A.M. and Crosbie, M.J. (2020). Educating architects in a post-pandemic world. https://commonedge.org/educating-architects-in-a-post-pandemic-world/ Schwier, R. A. and Seaton, J. X. (2013). A Comparison of participation patterns in selected formal, non-formal, and informal online learning environments. Canadian Journal of Learning & Technology, 39(1), pp.1–15. Vaikla-Poldma, T. (2003). An investigation of learning and teaching processes in an interior design class: An interpretive and contextual inquiry. Unpublished Ph.D., McGill University (Canada), Canada. Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: lerzan aras, lerzanaras@gmail.com Citation: Aras, L. (2021). Liberating Design Education after Corona Days. Academia Letters, Article 670. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL670. 5