- Designing is an iterative process and can incorporate many forms in order to organise, record and inform improvements in the creative thinking and actions that lead to tangible outcomes, which should have value. The act of designing requires the recording of thinking and such information as is necessary to advance the design towards realisation. In their book on Design Thinking, Ambrose and Harris define design as ‘a process that turns a brief or requirement into a finished product or design solution’ (ava Publishing, Basics Design 08 - 2010).This definition might equally be applied in art and design as well as in D&T. Within our subject we may not think of the creative challenges we set as ‘project briefs’, but we promote creative exploration by placing a greater premium on areas such as personal expression and making meaning.
- The Design Museum’s Designer Maker User (Phaidon 2016) sets out a clear history of design and includes definitions that are helpful for curriculum designers. They describe design as “a set of drawings, or of instructions. It describes an object, a building, a garment, a computer program or even a more abstract concept such as the procedure for collecting a paying taxes or voting in an election.” They go on to suggest “it requires enough detail, sometimes in the form of elevations, sections and plans, as well as three-dimensional renderings , sometimes as a model or diagram, to make it possible to envisage the object or process and also to be able to bring it onto being.” However, just as we might see these definitions as inferring industrialised forms of production, they also suggest ‘design is a process of trial and error’, and it can also be ‘the result of a personal creative vision that, rooted in the human fascination with form and shape, comes close to sculpture’. They further identify the modern paradox in contemporary design being both rooted in mass production and in editioned pieces, akin with contemporary artists.
- Whilst some descriptions of a design process infer a fixed order of specific stages or actions, other models of design suggest either alternative stages or far greater flexibility. One distinct difference between the approach to design taken when comparing art and design with D&T is that in our subject teachers promote a number of creative process actions, but almost never infer a consistent order to the sequence of process stages. Encouraging students to maximise creative flexibility by engaging with design or creative process stages in any order or in a holistic manner as dictated by the creative needs of the investigation.
