There is no doubt that the school subject design & technology is in serious trouble. The proportion of young people studying GCSE Design & Technology fell by 50% from 2009 to 2020. If this trend continues the subject will just fade away over the coming few years until it is taken by just a small minority of young people. The Design & Technology Association acknowledge that as it stands design & technology is broken but believe it can be mended and have articulated this in terms of their ‘Reimagining D&T’ initiative. Phil Holton (Senior Strategy Manager for Pearson UK Schools) adopts a different position arguing that design & technology should be replaced by an alternative subject and to this end he has worked with the DfE to develop a new subject named Responsible design & innovation to be introduced into the National Curriculum at KS3 and made available as a GCSE subject. Phil has not done this on his own but has consulted with several hundred teachers as well as profession bodies such as the Design Council, Royal Society of Arts, Royal Academy of Engineering and academics in the field of design education. This post concerns the proposed Responsible design & innovation programmes of study for KS3 which Phil acknowledges is still very much a work in progress.
Concerns about the title This reads as a subset of a larger endeavour hence I wonder if the proposal, needs to be wider with regard to the required nature of a school subject. A school subject might well include responsible design and Innovation as a key epistemic value but would need to have a wider subject matter remit which is reflected in its title and in the subject content.
Understanding a circular economy This is given prominence as an idea in the proposal and as such is to be welcomed but the level of detail in which this should be taught at KS3 needs to be clarified as the three basic principles and the related biological and technical cycles contain many concepts that are difficult to comprehend and to some extent counterintuitive.
Having to know too much about manufacturing One of the issues that has been discussed in the consultations has been the need to teach young people too much content. An example quoted to me by Phil was that of casting. One would want learners to appreciate that the casting process can be used to manufacture various items from various materials, but they didn’t need to know the details of how to cast with particular materials. So, in developing a prototype solution from easy to work materials learners would indicate which parts might be cast and from what material but would not be required to carry out the casting or know about it in depth. I have some sympathy with this process but would want young people to have some formative experiences of manufacturing processes, so they have a clear conceptual grasp on what is involved. Casting of various types always involves and putting a liquid into a 3D void which is in the form of the desired item. This can be experienced by learners using low temperature melting alloys and silicon moulds giving, for example, Dungeon and Dragons figures. That, or a similar hands-on experience, is vital if learners are to understand what casting involves. Hence it will be important for the PoS to identify a range of ‘this is how I would manufacture my prototype’ processes suitable for KS3 and for teachers to develop ways of giving formative experiences of these that enable learners to indicate clearly how their prototype proposal might be manufactured.
Insufficient technical content? I do think there is technical content that needs to be taught if learners are to develop prototypes that indicate how their proposal will actually work. So, the identification of content concerned with achieving functionality is important and at the moment this seems to be missing. So, something specific about how artefacts of various sorts might be powered, controlled and structured needs to be included. Not huge amounts but enough to put meeting these functionality requirements on the agenda and enough that enable learners to find out more for themselves should they need to do so. if learners know a small amount about a knowledge domain it is much easier for them to find out more than if they are starting from knowing nothing or almost nothing.
Too much D not enough T? There is no doubt that the proposal give prominence to design. I wonder if it gives too much prominence at the expense of considering technology. Designing operates through the implementation of various technologies (plural) and these are all subject to the intrinsic nature of technology (singular). The sorts of technologies that have significant impact on our society and are likely to be useful in tackling the problems facing us are often disruptive technologies and the nature of these has been clarified by McKinsey. In brief these are:
- They upset the status quo, for example overturning existing hierarchies and offering the possibilities of both more and less democratic hierarchies.
- They alter the way people live and work, for example increasing or decreasing employment opportunities, changing the knowledge and skills required for certain kinds of employment, shifting the expectations of education systems and altering relationships
- They reorganise financial and social structures, for example by redistributing financial rewards towards those who are deploying these technologies.
- They lead to entirely new products and services.
It’s relatively easy to identify a set of technologies that currently meet these crtiteria: Additive Manufacture, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Big Data, the Internet of Things, Neurotechnology, Programmable Matter, Robotics, Synthetic Biology. And as others emerge they could be added to the PoS. It would be useful to see this acknowledged inthe proposal.
Technology singular has been criticised by some philosophers as being intrinsically ‘inhumane’ with is emphasis on systematisation and efficiency (C S Lewis and Jacques Ellul), being outside human control, almost with a will of its own (Kevin Kelly) and embedded in a Trinitarian relationship with science and capitalism in which the possibility of making large amounts of money is the ultimate deciding factor in which technologies are developed and utilised. There are some counter voices to this (Tim O’Reilly) and particularly Shannon Vallor. Vallor identifies 12 technology virtues which could mitigate to a large extent the negative impacts of the intrinsic nature of technology. These are:
- Honesty
- Self-control
- Humility
- Justice
- Courage
- Empathy
- Care
- Civility
- Flexibility
- Perspective
- Magnanimity
- Wisdom
Each is derived from much older Aristotelian, Confucian and Buddhist ethical traditions. If, as I think is necessary, technology and technologies achieve a greater prominence in the proposal then some consideration of these virtues might pay dividends.
Wider reading required There is a growing literature concerned with technology education that deals with the nature of technology and how this might be considered in school technology or design & technology courses. The Springer Contemporary Issues in Technology Education series is particularly noteworthy and it is important that Phil and his advisers engage with this literature.
Prototyping as modelling? I wonder if the term model might be preferable to the term prototype. The whole of digital and physical prototyping may be seen in terms of modelling with the various models being developed to provide ever increasing levels of detail as the design idea is clarified to the point of being able to be realised as a working prototype. The various forms of models (and modelling) are chosen with regard to the clarification required and do not necessarily move in a sequence of simple 2D through to complex 3D. Models need to be useful for the task in hand (resolving a particular detail) as opposed to being completely accurate. So, it’s worth indicating what needs to be clarified and the sorts of model that might be appropriate. A starter list could be: overall external appearance, detailed external appearance, handling properties, internal details, functional component details and arrangements, functional behaviour, sensory appeal etc. The models to clarify such features may be digital or physical. Also, it might be worth aligning the modelling with the sorts of design decisions that learners will be required to make – conceptual, technical; aesthetic, manufacturing, stakeholder requirements.
There is more that I could write but given that the proposal is still a work in progress I think I’ve written enough. There is no doubt that Phil’s efforts in working with a range of stakeholders, including teachers, and the DfE are providing a long overdue wake up call to all those interested in the future of design & technology as a school subject in whatever guise it ultimately manifests itself.
As always comments welcome.
HildaRuth and Torben for D&T 