Toward mixed-media design studios

tal design studio. Unfortunately, the modern hybrid studio—straddling both digital and traditional methods—can experience new challenges along with the new tools” [1]. In many design studios, dedicated rooms with abundant display space are used for colocated design collaboration. And this is for good reasons. Externalizing and sharing design knowledge are key activities of everyday design practice. We share our design ideas or inspirational artifacts, such as paper sketches, printouts, and whiteboard drawings, in a spatial and informal way to invite comments and feedback within the design team. The physical display space in design studios thereby serves as a powerful tool that extends our social and cognitive abilities, including remembering, self-assessment, associating, and judging. Material artifacts assist as mediators for implicit communication between designers, developers, and other stakeholders involved in the design process. The spatiality of these physical representations and having things observable and in reach also facilitate a visual and embodied form of thinking. Being able to group and regroup artifacts in a direct and physical way allows us to identify relations, tensions, or analogies between the collected pieces [2]. Keeping artifacts in a collaborative space can also trigger free associations between knowledge from different design projects, which may lead to new and unexpected insights or ideas. In a way, these spatial arrangements are a tool for thinking and reflection—making cooperative design knowledge and the progress of the design process visible. Despite the manifold technological advancements we have witnessed in recent years, we still experience bottlenecks when digital design artifacts are used in the design process. Their representations are bound to digital tools that typically do not facilitate or invite the kinds of interactions described here. While digital objects such as images, videos, and websites are capable of representing dynamics and are easy to share and archive, they do not have the unique affordances of material artifacts. Due to the predominant desktop computing paradigm, digital representations often remain hidden in file systems. Furthermore, many digital tools are designed for individual use, isolating designers behind screens, leading to a breakdown of communication that is vital for a shared understanding in the group. Rigid interaction models or formal interaction techniques and modalities may further impose limitations not only on the spatial characteristics of design practice, but also on other important aspects such as embodiment of thought, the workflow of design methods, as well as coordination and communication. Due to this dualism of digital and material design artifacts and their respective qualities for designers, transitions between both worlds are quite common. These transitions, however, may harm the overall flow of the design process. As a result, designers often consider technology to be harmful in their collaborative work environments and stick to traditional media. By using physical artifacts and by harnessing the spatial properties of the design studio environment, they can make use of rich forms of expression like body language, facial expressions, and the immediacy of verbal communication that are crucial for expressing their creativity. However, at the same time they give up on potential benefits of using digital media, such as ease of documentaToward Mixed-Media Design Studios