Mobile-free studios: developing positive studio cultures on 2Y BA Fine Art
The intervention I propose is that certain studios in the 2Y BA Fine Art footprint become mobile phone free ones as part of a pilot aimed at addressing poor mental health and a demise in productive studio culture post-pandemic.
We have approximately 12 different studio rooms across 3 different floors of B-Block at Chelsea, currently with 162 students in the year. Take up across the studios can be limited and the most successful studios are ones which have actively engaged student community. The 25-26 cohort is looking to be 180-200 students with a slightly expanded studio footprint.
Students are to collectively select which studios are to trial this pilot, which will work on an opt-in basis. The aim is to create studio spaces where students:
- Feel safe and want to spend time
- Can work productively without distractive and extractive apps
- Can develop a discursive culture with their peers, and consequently feel less isolated
A colleague in product design has a contact for a charity that supplies ex-office furniture for free to educational establishments. As part of this intervention, I would get some sofas (meeting latest fire safety regulations) for studio spaces in the pilot to help create environments that encourage students to spend time there.
This intervention is informed by:
- My own research particularly 2015-17 into online behavioural addictions and the way that the meshing of telecommunications devices with network culture, helped create a context for the use of behavioural psychology to channel user attention, creating ‘sticky’ environments that people find very difficult to negotiate. [See https://www.katrionabeales.com/arewealladdictsnow & the accompanying book edited by Bartlett and Bowden-Jones (2017)].
- Two significant interpersonal ruptures within the student body 23-25. Both involved messages shared on social media negatively overspilling into the physical space of the college and studio, which had serious and longlasting impacts on studio culture and usage by students.
- Conversations with Sarah Campbell, the Mental Health Advice Manager at UAL, whom I have worked with closely regarding some of my 24-25 students who have experienced severe mental ill health.
- Various campaigns within different parts of the education sector. A network in secondary schools in the London borough I live in (Southwark) have recently banned smartphones [Hill (2024)].
I am aware this could be seen as overbearing and carefully need to position this, as I am not trying to encourage a Luddite position but one of having a critical engagement with technology. I am perhaps confusingly, very interested in digital artworks and am not suggesting it would be a laptop-free space. It is the dynamics around social media apps (reliant on smartphones) that evidence suggests are the most problematic for mental health [Girela-Serrano, B.M. et al. (2022) p.1646]. I am also aware of that many of our international students use translation software in tutorials and need to be careful that this isn’t discriminatory by encouraging the use of laptop or tablet devices as opposed to phones. The transition to using SEATs to mark attendance through student’s mobile phones is also potentially an issue. We can work around this by these studios having an agreement that once they have logged their attendance their phone is stored is off.
I would like to run this as a longitudinal trial over the autumn term 2025, with questionnaires exploring students’ perceptions on studio culture and their mental health in both the mobile-free studios and the ones that hadn’t participated in the pilot. I am aware I might need ethical clearance to undertake some of this research.
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Bibliography
Beales, K. et al. (2017) Are we all addicts now? Digital Dependence edited by Bartlett, V and Bowden-Jones, H. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press.
Hill , A. (2024) Group of 17 London Secondary Schools join up to go smartphone-free, The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/06/group-of-17-london-secondary-schools-join-up-to-go-smartphone-free (Accessed: 23 May 2025).
Girela-Serrano, B.M. et al. (2022) ‘Impact of mobile phones and wireless devices use on children and adolescents’ mental health: A systematic review’, European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 33(6), pp. 1621–1651. doi:10.1007/s00787-022-02012-8.
Lopez-Fernandez, O. et al. (2017) ‘Self-reported dependence on mobile phones in young adults: A European cross-cultural empirical survey’, Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 6(2), pp. 168–177. doi:10.1556/2006.6.2017.020.
Dear Katriona,
I hope that you are well and appreciate your engagement with formative submission and feedback. The format for this formative feedback is a 300-word maximum summary with 3 questions and or provocations supported by a resource for each item.
Please find below my feedback, which I hope that you find useful:
LO1: Critically evaluate institutional, national and global perspectives of equality and diversity in relation to your academic practice context. [Enquiry] –
Promising intervention that could be the first for a creative art institution to consider testing whether prohibition of having a mobile phone at hand supports creative focus, a desire to continue to use studios to engage in focused creative development, that could create a more cohesive culture. It would be interesting to know if the university has an institutional ethical viewpoint.
LO2: Manifest your understanding of practices of inequity, their impact, and the implications for your professional context. [Knowledge] –
There are some considered implications in other institutions, and you have considered whether it would impact their ability to check language translations without their phones. It might be worth checking the university’s policy on the use of mobile devices in the lecture space or classrooms. Based on various research it has its benefits and negatives likewise.
LO3: Articulate the development of your positionality and identity through the lens of inclusive practices. [Communication] –
The intervention is clearly informed by previous research and experiences that align with your positionality of being a lecturer with a large cohort of students, which is a very important starting point to consider in your reflective report. This approach creates an equitable space in which the main focus is peer relationships and support, within a creative context.
LO4: Enact a sustainable transformation that applies intersectional social justice within your practice. [Realisation] –
The transformation will benefit the students in being able to focus on their creative work and also offer you an opportunity to observe the outcome as an ethnographic observation, for which I would encourage you to take notes when you carry this out for the Action Research Project unit. I would suggest you think about the ethical use of mobile phones in class and student feedback, including resistance.
Finally, please find some further questions as provocations to support the development of your intervention:
Does the issue start from attachment to their devices? – Cui, G., Yin, Y., Li, S., Chen, L., Liu, X., Tang, K. and Li, Y. (2021). Longitudinal Relationships among Problematic Mobile Phone use, Bedtime procrastination, Sleep Quality and Depressive Symptoms in Chinese College students: a cross-lagged Panel Analysis. BMC Psychiatry, [online] 21(1).
Is there scope to consider requesting that phones are on silent and put away for the duration of the studio time? – Graben, K., Doering, B.K. and Barke, A. (2022). Receiving push-notifications from smartphone games reduces students learning performance in a brief lecture: An experimental study. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 5, p.100170.
Distraction or Support? – Dontre, A.J. (2020). The influence of technology on academic distraction: A review. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 3(3), pp.379–390.
Case study – Schmidt, C.R., Schmidt, S.R. and Wilson, K.A. (2022). Individual differences in memory disruption caused by simulated cellphone notifications. Memory, 30(10), pp.1349–1386.
What is your perceived impact? – Böttger, T., & Zierer, K. (2024). To Ban or Not to Ban? A Rapid Review on the Impact of Smartphone Bans in Schools on Social Well-Being and Academic Performance. Education Sciences, 14(8), 906.
Regards and take care,
Kwame Baah
I think this opens up a rich space for thinking about how we intentionally cultivate presence, care, and peer culture.
One thought that came to mind was the potential to use subtle environmental cues as behavioural nudges—things like “focus areas” that communicate studio values through space. It might help sustain the ethos of the intervention without relying solely on verbal reinforcement. The Behavioural Insights Team’s EAST Framework is a useful read on how small spatial prompts can shift norms gently and effectively.
You could also explore the role of shared rituals or micro-practices at the start of a studio session, maybe a short group intention-setting moment, Weirdly I like everyone involved tidying the space, a communal unpacking of materials, models or even something as simple as ambient music (You suggested that) to mark the transition into focused time. These can help students mentally detach from digital environments and arrive more fully in the space, reframing presence as generative rather than limiting.
Finally, I wonder if it might be helpful to frame this whole intervention not just as a culture fix, but as a situated, collective ethics experiment. Given your own research background and critical thoughts on digital distractions, this could be positioned as a kind of durational live work, an inquiry into space, attention, and peer care within arts education. There’s precedent for this in work like The Architecture of Attention by Hook and Vatter (2021), which explores how studio environments can shape and direct modes of thinking and being.
This feels like a deeply valuable contribution to the conversation about what studios are for, and how they might better support creative and collective wellbeing and health focus. Really looking forward to seeing how this unfolds.
Many thanks Adrian, I will have a look at these very helpful resources. Micro-rituals are things that I use in my own studio practice in terms of getting into the right headspace e.g. making a cup of tea in a particular cup but spatial prompts aren’t something I had previously considered. Really appreciate your time and in-depth engagement here.