Miro saved my online architecture studio

I’m currently a grad student in the Master of Architecture program at the University of Washington. Last year with the COVID pandemic, our in-person collaborative design studios went entirely remote- something has historically not happened. For the first few months, we struggled to adapt to the online design studio, but after an instructor obtained an academic license for our class, things changed immediately. No more frustrating scribbling over zoom on a shared screen pdf, only to change the page and have your drawings remain. No more hopping between windows and tabs and having windows not display properly. With Miro, I found my workflow instantly improve, and the web app was so intuitive it took almost no learning curve. As I gained more skills on what it could do, I started pushing to use Miro beyond just design sessions. It became a project planning tool for upcoming assignments and group projects, and eventually a presentation tool. I love having all my thoughts on one board, organized by frames and areas where I can make a quick substitution on a presentation image without re-exporting and uploading a PDF. And the resolution and latency are amazing for sharing and multi-user collaboration.

As an architecture grad student, most of our studio work is collaborative, while at the same time, still a learning environment where we are actively making mistakes and getting instructor feedback as we revise designs. The addition of Miro has provided an invaluable way to document the changes over time, without spending additional time doing so. Every session, we start afresh frame with the key points of the previous design and push the work forward from there. After months of this, as a studio project nears completion, it’s rewarding to zoom out of a board and see how far you’ve come in such a short time, as well as quickly identify critical points that shouldn’t be lost along the way.