Design and Make: A Critical Look

In this episode of Talking D&T, I explore the complex nature of design and make activities in design and technology education. Drawing on research from Richard Kimball, David Perry, and Robert McCormick, I unpack the pedagogical approach of design and make that underpins our subject and challenge some common misconceptions about "the design process".

A key insight emerges around the balance between process and outcome in D&T education. When we become fixated on the final product, we risk compromising valuable learning opportunities along the way. I examine Matt McLain's framework of expansive versus restrictive approaches, questioning when it's appropriate to give pupils freedom to make decisions and when more structured guidance serves them better.

I also explore McCormick's notion of 'revelation and ritual' in design processes, highlighting the danger of following steps mechanistically without making learning explicit to pupils. This raises important considerations about how we develop pupils' design and technology capability rather than simply guiding them through predetermined steps.

For D&T teachers, this episode offers a chance to reflect on your own practice. How do you balance the focus on outcomes with the development of skills and knowledge? Where in your projects do pupils have genuine opportunities to make decisions, experience failure, and justify their choices?

Whether you're teaching in a primary or secondary setting, these considerations are crucial for developing authentic design and technology capability in your pupils. How might you adapt your planning to create a more balanced approach to design and make activities in your classroom?

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.

I am encouraging you to respond to the Ofsted Consultation on their proposals for future inspections.

Here's where you can find the details: Ofsted Consultation 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Design & Make Approach
• 2:20 Research on Design Processes
• 4:40 Restrictive vs Expansive Teaching Methods
• 6:39 Design as Ritual vs Revelation
• 9:48 Balancing Outcomes vs Learning
• 13:57 Episode Closing & Next Week Preview

Transcript

Alison Hardy: 1:22

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 pedagogical approach. This is known as really the most common approach that we use in design and technology and if you've listened to last week's episode, you'll be aware that I talk about how we sometimes in design and technology, conflate a pedagogy with knowledge. So I just need to first of all unpick what the research says about design and make as a process. There's very strong research evidence for saying follow through that design and make process, be deciding to do particular forms of research in particular places or particular types of specification. You might be making some of the decisions for yourself. You can't say that, for example, as well, that formative evaluation happens must happen at this point. This point and this point because it varies depending on what the context is, what the available resources are and so on. So that's the first sort of health warning from the research is that there is no single design process. There are design processes. Is that the right word? And within that we could say that the design make and if we add the final one on as evaluate, okay, I'm a little bit twitchy about putting those three in an order because we're implying that they have to come in that order, and it's not. It's just a label, but that is an all-encompassing term of a category, of a pedagogy where the children work through from inception to completion. And that's what Richard Kimball and David Perry talk about is a design and make activity which is very task centred. So it's resolving a problem, a context, but to do that the pupils have to undertake different tasks along the way. Some of those might be quite directed, quite structured, by you as the teacher, whereas some of them might give you, the children, more freedom to make design decisions. Remember back to those first episodes in this series when I was talking about design and technology capability how are the things that you are doing and what you are teaching and the activities and the tasks that the children are undertaking? How are they building their design and technology capability? So if at every stage of a design and make activity, you've made, as a teacher, the majority of the decisions, then where are you allowing the children to learn how to make decisions and what knowledge they need to draw on, and selecting what knowledge they want to draw on and justifying those decisions along the way? So it's being mindful of that when you design, a design and make and I think this is where Matt McLean's research comes in to useful in into use.

Alison Hardy: 5:05

Talking about all over the place, I'm trying to move on to a different document in front of me to talk through. So Matt has a framework about pedagogies and he talks about where things are surface, deep and implicit. I'm not going to go into those at the moment, but he talks about expansive and restrictive and he talks about where you're making more of the decisions being quite restrictive, and sometimes that is completely appropriate, and at other times they are quite expansive. That means you're giving the children more freedom to make decisions and again, that is completely appropriate. And Matt would argue that much of this is involved in project-based learning. We've got to be really careful here, because project-based learning, pbl has been dismissed by some elements of the education community and we need to be really careful that we're not saying that every part of design and make is project-based or problem-based learning. That's slightly different. I would say design and technology is more project-based and sometimes, but not always, involves problems, and so I think we need to tease apart what those definitions are.

Alison Hardy: 6:26

So this again is quite complex in thinking about. How are you structuring a design and make activity that is task-based, that involves inception to completion. Where are you being restrictive and where are you being expansive? So there's all these many factors that you're building on when you're designing a design and make, and one of the health warnings that comes with this is a paper that I referred to last week, which is from Bob McCormick, patricia Murphy and Marion Davidson about design and technology as revelation and ritual. That's what it's called, and when you, as a teacher, plan what you see as the usual steps in a design process, they talk about defining a context, creating a design brief, doing some research, writing a specification and so on. If it's done in such a ritualistic way we might say a non-reflective way, where pupils aren't made aware of it, then you cannot guarantee that the children are picking up on each of those steps and recognising them for themselves and that there are different steps that they can take. So, again, in the way that you plan these design and make task orientated activities, if you're thinking that the children are learning the or a design process, then you need to be mindful about whether you're making that explicit and also whether you're making it explicit in an appropriate way that this is just one way of following these different steps and that you're using it, and you're using it to teach, but you're wanting them to understand that busy steps and that there are different ways of doing it. So you need to be making clear those connections along the way, and that's quite difficult as a teacher to do that. But I think, in terms of what the literature says, I think it is really important to think about these different steps and how you tie them all together. What I haven't even come on to is thinking about the outcomes, is thinking about whether you're being restricted by what the outcomes are, and that's another aspect that's a challenge when we are designing projects and designing these pedagogical approaches is are we fixated on what the end solution is rather than thinking about what the learning is along the way?

Alison Hardy: 9:14

Looking at some more work of Robert McCormick and yet you can tell that I do like his work a lot I think it's more that I'm conscious that there's not been so much research done since the work that he did at Open University that has been involved in going into classrooms and looking at students' work in this country. There's more done internationally but not so much in England anymore and that's due to the fact that it costs so much money. So that's part of the reason why I keep going back. But equally, I think so much of what he writes about is still there and is still a challenge. So in this study he looked at three different cases in schools about teachers planning a number of sessions which involved design and make. He talks about that teachers tended to focus a lot on the make because of their craft background and we might say that some of that is still an issue within teaching design and technology in England. It wasn't to say from his research that the teachers were not interested in what they were learning along the way and thinking about the processes of designing or the knowledge they were learning about materials or about electronics, as it was in one of these cases, but it's.

Alison Hardy: 10:33

At which point did it become that the outcome was driving the decisions and that the balance, as he says, is tipped in favour of some kind of product outcome rather than, as I said, the thinking about the process of designing, the problem solving and all the knowledge they were using or drawing on along the way in the design decisions that were made? So where was the assessment opportunity, the development of the visibility of children's design and technology capability. And so that's because there's so many drivers. And it's not to say that these end products, he says, are not more important, but sometimes they take more precedence and therefore that has a consequence on students learning along the way. And also, if the focus is on the outcome, he goes on to say and other researchers like Bill Nicol have also spoken about this if the focus is on the outcome, then they don't experience the opportunity of learning from failure and actually also the learning from failure that does happen is more to do with the making rather than the ideas. So it's, it's that balance of what is it of the children learning along the way, getting better at having opportunity to practice, experience, do justify, make decisions, of all of those verbs that are along along the way. I hope those are verbs I think I've just talked about.

Alison Hardy: 12:01

Might just got carried away for a moment there, but you need to, in your planning and a design and make, think about the um, the risk and the opportunities for failure and for making decisions which might lead to whatever we might call failure. But whilst being aware that teachers might be balancing, you might be balancing the, the expectations that other teachers, that that students and even parents attach to successfully finishing a project and having a finished outcome um to to look at, and there's a huge lot of value in doing that. So again, it's not to underestimate that, but it's about being aware of if you tip more towards one than the other, than the outcome, than the processes, the learning, the knowledge along the way, then what might be lost, and it might be that you're not thinking about the development of their design and technology capability. So those are some things to think about and that will lead me quite nicely on to next week's episode, where I'm talking about the idea of designing without making, which comes from Donna Treble's doctoral work, and then moving into mainly making as a follow-up to that along the way. So hopefully that suits some food for thought for you. I'll be interested to know what decisions and what reflections you take along the way. So hopefully that serves as some food for thought for you. I'd be interested to know what decisions and what reflections you take along the way when you're balancing those different elements of planning a design and make in your teaching.

Alison Hardy: 13:32

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 dnt community in developing their practice, so please do share the podcast with your dnt 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 speakpipeipe 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.