Values in Design and Technology: More Than Just Technical Decisions

In this episode of Talking D&T, I explore the complex role of values in design and technology education. Drawing on research from influential scholars like David Layton, Mike Martin and Rhoda Trimingham, I unpack how values aren't merely peripheral to D&T but are, as Layton puts it, "the engine of design and technology."

I examine two key perspectives: values within design (how values influence design decisions) and values developed through design and technology (how students develop values as they become technologically literate). Particularly fascinating is Trimingham's research observing designers in practice, revealing how both internal and external values shape design decisions, often unconsciously.

We explore how early curriculum frameworks categorised values as technical, economic, aesthetic, and moral—frameworks that remain relevant despite their absence from the current National Curriculum. This raises important questions about how we as educators bring our own value systems into our teaching, potentially modelling these unconsciously to our pupils.

For D&T teachers, this episode offers an opportunity to reflect on how we might make values more explicit in our teaching, helping pupils understand not just how to design, but how their values influence those designs. Whether you're teaching in England or internationally, considering the role of values adds depth to design education and helps students develop critical awareness of design decisions.

How might you bring conversations about values more explicitly into your D&T classroom? Could examining values help your students make more thoughtful design decisions? Let's continue this important dialogue with colleagues about preserving these vital aspects of our subject.

Acknowledgement:
Some of the supplementary content for this podcast episode was crafted with the assistance of Claude, an AI language model developed by Anthropic. While the core content is based on the actual conversation and my editorial direction, Claude helped in refining and structuring information to best serve listeners. This collaborative approach allows me to provide you with concise, informative, and engaging content to complement each episode.

Chapters

• 14:00 Understanding Values in Design and Technology
• 1:07:00 The Role of Educators' Values
• 14:50:00 Navigating Complexity: Values in Design Decisions

Transcript

Alison Hardy: 0:06

you're listening to the talking dnt podcast. I'm dr allison hardy, a writer, researcher and advocate of design and technology education. In each episode I share views, news and opinions about dnt going to talk about. What does the research say about values in design and technology education? Now, there's quite a few different ways that values can be talked about. It's a very complex concept so I, just before we go any further, want to be really clear about how I'm talking about it and how I'm not talking about it, so that when we go on to talk about what the research says, we understand the context. Excuse me.

Alison Hardy: 0:51

So in a paper that I published, I think, back in 2015, I was talking about some of my early work, about what people say the value of design and technology is. That is not what I'm going to be talking about, the research about today. I'm not going to be talking about what you, I, other people, say is important or that we value about design and technology education. I'm going to be talking about it in really two other ways. Mike Martin refers to one of these ways as the values within design and technology, and I'm going to talk about Mike's chapter in the Learning to Teach book, the fourth edition, because he talks he's got a chapter in there about values. But what Mike is talking about when he talks about values within design and technology, he's talking about the role of values in making design decisions or understanding new technologies. Then the other way of thinking about values in design and technology is values developed through design and technology, and John Dacus and Steve Kerr have written this about how a pupil becomes technologically literate as a consequence of studying D&T. Or they develop different values about, for example, the environment or the economy or the importance of different materials over one or another. That's one thing that can be imbued in design and technology and can be considered.

Alison Hardy: 2:28

I think that's one of the things that previous governments, when they've taken values out of the D&T curriculum, have kind of shied away from. It's not about trying to instill particular values in children, so let's not talk about values that are developed through D&T children. So let's not talk about values that are developed through D&T, which is slightly ironic when we talk about young people and adults and children learning about British values. But anyway, let's leave that one aside. So we're not talking about directly about how values are developed through D&T, but we do know that as teachers, educators, we bring our own values and our value systems to our lessons and we need to have an awareness about that. So I would be having a look at John Dacre's work and Steve Curl's work if I was you, if you want to explore that.

Alison Hardy: 3:16

But I will touch on that a bit as I'm going through in this episode, talking about what does the research say about values in design and technology education, or, as Mike says, values developed through design and technology education? In Mike's chapter in the Learn to Teach book, values in D&T, mike opens with a quote from David Leighton from 1992, so this is around the time of the first iteration of the national curriculum. David Layton says values and value judgments are the engine of design and technology. Judgments about what is possible and worthwhile initiate activity, judgments about how intentions are to be realized shape the activity and judgments about the efficacy and effects of the product influence the next steps to take. Value judgments reflecting people's beliefs, concerns and preferences are ubiquitous in design and technology activity. So right from the very start the researchers said that values are a key component. Unfortunately, as I've indicated, they're not so dominant or clearly articulated any longer in the national curriculum, but I want to bring that back in and that's why I want to talk about. What does the research say about values in design and technology education? So let's just a little bit unpick a little bit about where Leighton is coming from. So Leighton is thinking about working with pupils who are undertaking D&T activities and how it must control, contribute to their general education. I'm a big advocate that D&T is a key component of a general education in the world, and Mike Martin and David Leighton and I think they've been hugely influential in my thinking about how we think about values in design and technology. So we need to have to think about these different ways that values shape our intentions, or shape intentions in designing, shape the process, the steps that people take and then the judgments that they make about the product and its influence and what it should be like.

Alison Hardy: 5:39

Now Trimmingham and my mind has just gone completely blank about what her first name is and we just scroll back up very, very quickly to the beginning of the paper that I've got open Rhoda Trimmingham. Okay, she had a PhD looking at the role of values in design decision making and I'll put a link in the show notes to the paper that she talks about. She's got in my mind quite a complex taxonomy but she makes a really good argument for the importance of values and she has some empirical work and what I mean by that is she has studied, observed designers in practice, from A-level through to professionals, about what are the design decisions that they are making and looking at the influence of values that are informing those design decisions. So the paper that she talks about, which I'm talking about, which she draws on, highlight some of these different ones and I think there's an awful lot within there. That kind of blew my head off.

Alison Hardy: 6:43

But she talks about the external and the internal values of what she's seen. So through her literature review she created, I'm calling it a taxonomy. It's basically a table, a framework of different definitions of values and she talks about what happens outside and what happens inside, and very much the inside is the designer's interpretation that they are perceiving of what the client, the maker, will have in terms of the product that's being designed, but also the values that I have, if I'm a designer, that I bring to the design of the product that I may not even be able to articulate, but I come with my own judgment values. And then there's the values externally which have been externally, which have been explicitly sought from the client that the designer is explicitly bringing. That can also be seen when an individual is designing.

Alison Hardy: 7:53

This is really complex. I'm hoping you're keeping up here, you know. But Rada Trimming's work, I think, is quite complex. But I think what is fascinating about it is she's observed designers in practice and asked them to articulate what they are doing. She's called a talk aloud, a concurrent verbalization of what they were doing and why they were doing it and then sort of unpicked that to see values in action. So so we know from trimmingham's work that values are, are acting and influencing different design decisions. So I think, if that is the case, trimmingham's got the evidence and I think it'd be very difficult to argue against our own experience of as designers, as people who use products, about how we interact with products and technology, to not recognize that our own values are affecting that.

Alison Hardy: 8:55

And so I think in design and technology, if we go back to what Leighton was saying and earlier than him, george Hicks, who was the HMI for design and technology, they categorized these different values under under different headings and sort of used these and these were in the national curriculum as thinking about something that we need to be able to categorise and teach, okay. So one way that Hicks talks about them is technical, economic, aesthetic and moral values. Okay, so that these, for example, the technical values are around the efficiency, the robustness, the quality, okay, whether it will be reliable. The economic values Now, this is not just the monetary economic value, but there might be some intrinsic values there, also about what we believe this object, this product, might represent, about us, or, if we're designing for somebody else, what we want it to represent about them. And then we've got the aesthetic values about, um, how, how a product and we're talking about aesthetics in terms of all five senses here, about the way, um, that is, that we as humans then relate to this product, this technology, this thing, using our five senses. Okay. And then the moral values Hicks talks about is about, for example, the impact on the environment, our own responsibility, whether this object, this thing, this artifact, this technology has a relationship with culture, with religion, with beliefs, okay, and whether it actually does meet individuals or excludes individuals. Okay. So that was Hicks really early work in 1982 that's talked about.

Alison Hardy: 10:57

Leighton later on developed this and, excuse me, I've got a bit of a cold today so I do apologise if I'm kind of getting in the way of your listening. He developed this so still with the technical, still with the economic, still with the aesthetic, but now brought in the social, which is more about the individual, the regard for different people, whether excluded or included. Leighton was writing in 1992, so he talks about the equality of the sexes. We might talk about that quite differently now, but this is work. This is thinking that Leighton did around values, environmental, okay, so this is nothing new. Thinking about the environment as a, as a value, is it? Is it ecologically benign? Is it beneficial, is it detrimental? Do we think about the um cradle to cradle or just cradle to waste? You know cradle to, you know to to landfill? How do we think about it in the design? And then the moral is still in there, developing from Hicks's work. But then now talking about the spiritual and religious um is a commitment he talks about to the conception of humans and their relationship to nature. So I think Leighton's categorisation of values is just one way of doing that.

Alison Hardy: 12:22

But this research has kind of come and gone. I mean Steve Cole is, I think, a real key author in this idea and has been over time thinking about values, and Mike Martin as well in his chapter Learning to Teach. Sorry, values in Design and Technology. In the Learning to Teach book you know thinking about how do we get children that were teaching about values, what's our way of thinking about it? And you know the research is there that says this is central. Just because it's not in the curriculum doesn't mean we should do it. So I think maybe we need to be more explicit if we go back to that 1992 curriculum, more explicit about the values that we're teaching than where it is at the moment. But we can go too far in that way and just think about this categorization rather than actually facilitating pupils design decisions that use values, that draw on values, and helping them think about different ways and us recognising as educators and teachers about how we're teaching children to think about values, not just in the product that they're developing but in how their values are influencing those design decisions.

Alison Hardy: 13:43

So I think Trimbingham's work is quite useful at this point to think about how we bring those two things together. Leighton's taxonomy, which is very much about I feel very much about the product and the artifact his research is there. But Trimbingham's is very much more about thinking about how values are influencing, shaping design decisions, and I think if you look at Mike Martin's chapter, I think that brings that all together really nicely. So that's thinking about values, a different way of doing it, and thinking about the political context, about why they may not be in the national curriculum in England now, but why they are actually still there just because they're be in the national curriculum in England now, but why they are actually still there just because they're not in the national curriculum, and maybe it's right for teachers to bring those to the fore using some of that work from Leighton Trimmingham I haven't mentioned Prime and Curl to think about values in the context of design and technology and where we as educators are bringing our own values into the subject and are we subconsciously, unconsciously, modeling those to pupils without questioning them and questioning whether our values are the right values?

Alison Hardy: 14:50

So that's another way of thinking about this topic. Anyway, hope you found that interesting. That's some of the a bit of a light touch on the research. This is a really heavy topic. You might have heard me kind of struggling to articulate it as I've gone through this, but I think it is difficult and it is complex and looking at what the research says about values within design and values as a designer, I think is for me really important and I hope you find it too and have a look at some of that reading. Thanks for listening. Just saying that some some of the a bit of a light touch on the research. This is a really heavy topic. You might have heard me kind of struggling to articulate it as I've gone through this, but I think it is difficult and it is complex, and looking at what the research says about values within design and values as a designer, I think is for me really important and I hope you find it. Find it too, and have a look at some of that reading. Thanks for listening.

Alison Hardy: 15:42

I'm Dr Alison Hardy and you've been listening to the Talking D&T podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, then do subscribe on whatever platform you use, and do consider leaving a review, as it does help others find the podcast. I do the podcast because I want to support the D&T community in developing their practice, so please do share the podcast with your D&T community. If you want to respond to something I've talked about or have an idea for a future episode, then either leave me a voice memo via Speakpipe or drop me an email. You can find details about me, the podcast and how to connect with me on my website, dralisonhardycom. Also, if you want to support the podcast financially, you can become a patron. Links to SpeakPipe, patreon and my website are in the show notes. Thanks for listening.