Author ORCID Identifier
Miikka J. Lehtonen: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9578-4546
Gionata Gatto: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7329-6293
Abstract
While literature on (design) education understands passion as positively impacting learning experiences, our point of departure in this paper is to ask whether too much passion can be detrimental in the design studio. Using our autoethnographic accounts as design educators in a university recently established in the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) region, we make visible broader social structures that granulate our analytical understanding of passion in the design studio. More specifically, our experiences highlight the temporality and contextuality of passion, and drawing on sociological studies on emotion work, we refer to the actions that individuals take to manage their passion as passion work. As passion work is a collection of activities balancing between individual desires and institutional frameworks, our findings contribute to the growing body of design education knowledge, with a conceptual lens oriented to unfold possible modes of passion-writing and its manifestations in the design studio.
Keywords
passion; passion work; design education; autoethnography; design studio
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.335
Citation
Lehtonen, M., and Gatto, G. (2020) Unfolding passion: Autoethnography on the emergence and impact of teacher’s passion in the design studio, in Boess, S., Cheung, M. and Cain, R. (eds.), Synergy - DRS International Conference 2020, 11-14 August, Held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.335
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Unfolding passion: Autoethnography on the emergence and impact of teacher’s passion in the design studio
While literature on (design) education understands passion as positively impacting learning experiences, our point of departure in this paper is to ask whether too much passion can be detrimental in the design studio. Using our autoethnographic accounts as design educators in a university recently established in the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) region, we make visible broader social structures that granulate our analytical understanding of passion in the design studio. More specifically, our experiences highlight the temporality and contextuality of passion, and drawing on sociological studies on emotion work, we refer to the actions that individuals take to manage their passion as passion work. As passion work is a collection of activities balancing between individual desires and institutional frameworks, our findings contribute to the growing body of design education knowledge, with a conceptual lens oriented to unfold possible modes of passion-writing and its manifestations in the design studio.