What is the design studio? How does it function? What are its psychological and cognitive foundations? Is it updated and adapted to the 21st c., its technological frenzies and its pedagogical changes? The design studio can be understood as a construct that in part updates, and in part continues, the pedagogical system that was set up at the Académie Royale in the 18th century, and that has survived through the Beaux Arts, the polytechnic and the Bauhaus schools, to our days. This paper seeks to study and pull together the literature on design thinking and update it to current-day knowledge. It is a first approach to explore and expose the essence of the design studio today; to see if it is adapted as a pedagogical system to our modern academic competence-based apprenticeships, and to the EEES; and to evaluate its relevance today in the learning of our and especially of other disciplines, which are desperately looking for ways to capture and convey their practical knowledge.
