Students’ Perceptions of Giving and Receiving Design Critiques in an Online Learning Environment

A common practice in design education settings is participation in crits, or design critiques, in which critical feedback is given about creative works in progress. This paper presents a rationale for Studio Zone, a web-based environment to support design critiques, and results of a study of the software in use in a graduate software design course. We focus on how students perceived design critiques in general, and how they perceived Studio Zone as a tool for participating in critiques in an asynchronous, online environment. Results revealed that critique was a valued activity and that participation in critiques was shaped by social factors such as rapport and perceptions of shared concepts of critique, as well as the constraints of the technology. Students perceived asynchronous critiquing in Studio Zone as providing certain valuable affordances while also voicing some reservations about giving critiques to peers online. These results suggest implications for how critiques should be structured and guided within the context of a course in which students engage in asynchronous and/or face-to-face design critiques.