Abstract
Socio-petal spaces have proven to be crucial for students’ social life especially in outdoor spaces and common gathering areas; however, actual design studio seating deserves to be examined as well. In various studies, it is revealed that there may be a correlation between seat location, seat selection and student performance. As social interaction is among the essential qualities of design education where training is based on table critiques and face to face discussions, studios ideally should provide the desired interaction. This research explores the students’ preference of seating assuming that it affects the consequent success of the student, in terms of social interaction and movement pattern, conducted in classically arranged rows and columns based studio layout, far from being ideal, where the movement pattern among the tables and the visual field become the most important modes of communication between students and instructors. The syntactic values of tables located adjacent to windows or aisles, middle rows, or back seats, front lines or wall corners help to determine the reason behind preference and selection of these seats. Integration values along with mean depth data are used to explore the socially active and passive sections of the studio layout, while isovists are examined to analyse the visual scope of each assigned seat. The results indicate that when the medium is crowded the position of the tables located alongside of circulation path gains importance. When the medium is less crowded, students prefer to prioritize their visual scope rather than physical accessibility.
