Arguably the twenty-fi rst century is characterised by a myriad of challenges and a rapid pace of change and troublesome conditions, such as the environment, the global economic crisis and numerous confl icts of all sorts. It is within this context that our plea for increased critical thinking and critical design is situated. Projects such as the Bird ' s Nest in Beijing or the Olympic Village in London have all been extensively covered by both mainstream and specialised architectural press. In

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... all these projects, the spotlight of attention has been on the design and the designer. The 'Starchitects', a term used to refer to world-famous architects who have achieved a sort of celebrity or an idol status, are at the centre of the attention. The choice of cities and developers to create iconic buildings, designed by these celebrity architects, can be understood as ways to create more profi t or to become global cities. The context of the design and the neighbourhoods around these and the daily life experience of the people these projects are interfering with seem of lesser importance. Unfortunately, this imbalance between the attention for the design product and its designer on the one hand and the intended or the future audience on the other is also present in the design studio pedagogy as it is being employed in most schools of architecture. This imbalance truly confl icts with the initial conceptualisation and theorised possibilities of studio-based learning approaches (Schön, 1987 ) . In parallel to these developments, the technological evolution of the last decades not only