What can first-year undergraduate students “envision” from a pandemic?

The COVID-19 pandemic has further compounded the inherent complexities of design pedagogy. At the same time, offering an online teaching method made it imperative to incorporate the pandemic’s implications in the design process upon experiencing its adverse impacts. This study investigates landscape architecture students’ design approaches and understandings in a real-world studio based on the before and after COVID-19 scenarios. The findings show that most students designed multi-functional public open spaces before the COVID-19 period while they envisioned post-pandemic uses after the COVID-19 period. The study results not only offer insights for online or distance learning for design students, but also prepare design-oriented solutions for the pandemic-related episodes.