Open Studio
Hyning Gan
Open Studio: Perspectives on Design Education Through Teaching, Learning, and Practice is a research-driven editorial publication that examines the current state of design education through interviews, personal essays, and thematic frameworks. The book is organised around three spectrums—ACADEMIA and INDUSTRY, ART and DESIGN, SELF and SERVICE—each representing a tension that design education continuously navigates.
Through conversations with educators, students, and practitioners, the book surfaces the assumptions, contradictions, and shared questions that define design education in this moment.
The perspective brought to this project emerged from four years of studying design and working in the industry simultaneously. This experience made the distance between what design education claims to do and what professional practice actually demands increasingly difficult to ignore.
Accompanying the publication is an open-source process website that publicly documents the research, notes, and visual material gathered across the year spent making this book. It is an extension of the project's commitment to openness and mutual learning as a form of design education in itself.
Open Studio is an attempt to sit with these tensions honestly rather than resolve it. It is a time capsule of design education today, made by someone still inside it, navigating what it means to become a designer on their own terms.