An virtual hybridity: a new place to design?

This paper documents an investigative action-research project which explores a new virtual hybridity for design studio activity. This work specifically challenges how creative teaching and learning are facilitated in a traditional design school studio environment and adapts to embrace a new virtual studio paradigm which parallels and supports an interactive corporeal studio setting unbound by the confines of location. The research explores a new methodology for creative educational practice introducing a hybrid environment where participants simultaneously practice, interact and communicate design through virtual, digital and physical locations. The paper details the investigation and forms analysis and commentary of a new expressive pedagogical form.
This new hybrid studio impacts the way design is taught, forcing a change in how design thinking can be transmitted and used in educational and commercial settings. Significant impact is demonstrated through new methods of connecting and transferring knowledge in a local educative setting (peer to peer) and out into the professional design marketplace. The paper uses experimental practices to frame a new virtualized collaborative space (X-Studio) which is modelled through a series of cognitively mapped case studies and an experimental pilot virtual studio simulation that embraces the haptic and proxemic learning environment.