Beyond Design and Make: Exploring Pedagogical Approaches in D&T

In this episode, I delve into the pedagogical approaches that exist beyond the traditional 'design and make' activities in Design and Technology education. Drawing on research literature and classroom practice, I explore how 'mainly designing' and 'mainly making' activities can be powerful pedagogical tools when used deliberately and appropriately.

I share insights from Bill Nichol's work on designing for future contexts, including how case studies and question cards can help pupils develop empathy and understanding for users they cannot directly access. I also examine Hilda Ruth Beaumont's contributions to the Young Foresight Project, which demonstrated how pupils can design with materials not yet available in classrooms.

The episode highlights how these approaches allow pupils to explore unfamiliar contexts—whether from different countries, time periods, or future scenarios—without being constrained by their current making skills. I discuss how focused practical tasks provide opportunities for pupils to develop material understanding and manufacturing skills without the cognitive overload that can accompany full design and make activities.

These pedagogical approaches aren't replacements for design and make activities but complementary strategies that enhance pupils' learning. By recognising when we're using 'mainly designing' or 'mainly making' approaches (rather than masquerading them as design and make activities), we can better structure learning experiences that build capability.

How might your curriculum benefit from explicitly planning for 'mainly designing' and 'mainly making' activities? Could these approaches help you introduce pupils to emerging technologies or contexts beyond their immediate experience? Share your thoughts with colleagues and join the conversation about expanding our pedagogical repertoire in D&T education.

References, activities, and resources mentioned:

1. Donna Trebell's doctoral studies on "designing without making"
2. Young Foresight Project (late 1990s) - introducing children to new materials and processes not available in classrooms
3. Bill Nichol's work on question cards for exploring different users
4. "Designing Our Tomorrows" research by Bill Nichol, including hands-on kit
5. Bob McCormick's paper on "the ritual of the design project"
6. Matt McLain's and Sarah Davies' collaborative work with me on "mainly designing" and "mainly making" terminology
7. Nuffield resources for focused practical tasks (available on "dandtfordant" website)
8. IDEO cards (mentioned in context of exploring different functions and uses of objects)

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.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to D&T Pedagogy
• 2:11 Designing Without Making Approach
• 5:39 Case Studies & Design Fiction
• 8:59 Benefits of Mainly Designing Activities
• 11:24 Making Without Designing Approach
• 13:14 Focused Practical Tasks vs Design-Make
• 15:40 Episode Wrap-Up & Call to Action

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. So far, in this pedagogy section of this series on what the research says about design and technology, I've looked very generally at pedagogy in terms of defining the difference between pedagogy and curriculum, and also at the main signature pedagogy design and make activities. In this week's episode I want to separate design and make into design and make into two separate pedagogical approaches that we often see in design and technology. So what we most commonly see, as I've said, according to literature and even if you look around at what research has been done on learning activities and design and technology, it tends to focus on the design and make as a whole activity and occasionally on the design aspect, but actually very rarely on the make and the make as a form of prototyping. So if we look at what the literature says around designing and we just take this as an activity which we call at Nottingham Trent mainly designing, which originated from some really interesting work by Donna Treble, designing without making when she did this as part of her doctoral studies pedagogical activity where the children might be given a context to think about responding to and designing for, and may well get as far as doing a video explaining how their design idea might work, or a very rough what David Bramston calls a dirty model, sort of made of different bits and pieces to hand to kind of show the general concept of the idea. The advantage of this, according to the literature, is that children don't need to be so concerned about having the practical skills to make any firm realisation of their idea, so there's a distinct advantage to it there. It also gives an option of then being able to explore unfamiliar contexts, whether this is an unfamiliar context from another country, from another time, another space.

Alison Hardy: 2:33

In the Young Foresight Project, which was around in the late 1990s I'm trying to stretch my mind back to which school I was teaching at when I worked with the Young Foresight Project was teaching at when I worked with the Young Foresight Project is there was very much there about thinking about what the future might be like and what some new components were that might be in development that you couldn't handle, you didn't have in the classroom. But that didn't mean you couldn't give the opportunity for children to design products around it, and I remember Hilda Ruth Beaumont talking about this active sort of activity and really led on this with the Young Foresight Project and later work about introducing children in classrooms to new materials, new processes, new systems, new components that they couldn't have ready access to but could use to think about what the future might be like and to project what the future might be like. So, for example, you might give them a smart material that you can't get in the classroom but you've read is under development. Now the knowledge isn't so much about here the development of this new material. Yes, you could talk about how new materials are developed or new processes developed, what happens in universities and professions and industry, how they develop new materials, but actually here what the focus is on is the design strategies that are used for the children to be able to respond to and think about the use of this newly developing material. So it might be, for example, that you've got a smart material that you've seen that's underdeveloped. It's been mentioned in a magazine or an article that you've read online and you're thinking that would be a really good example of a developing technology that we could use in the classroom. So what you could think about is then what's a case study that would be linked to when we think this new material might be in existence. Let's say it might be another 20 years and it's at this point. I think I'd be using some prompts in AI to help me write those case studies, as if I was a teacher and I'd be thinking right. So I've got these rough ideas, these different things.

Alison Hardy: 4:48

What might the future be for older people in the year 2045? Okay, let's say you've kind of picked up that this material, these scientists, these technologists are thinking might be around in the mid 2040s, be around in the mid-2040s. And so you're thinking, right, what might society be like? So you could ask AI to explore that and particular something like Copilot, where it links to the internet, and then you could say, right from that, could you write me a case study about what a life might be like. I want to share this with children of the age of 11 or 12 in a design and technology lesson so they understand and have an idea about what life might be like for older people in the year 2020-45, based on what the projections are about what society might be like. So you'd have a case study and then you could even use that another AI to generate some images and maybe some video about what people are experiencing the year 2025, 2045 I'm in 2025 now um.

Alison Hardy: 5:52

So this idea about using case studies is a pedagogical approach. You've now got a case study and then you could teach the children about how they could understand and create a story around this person that they're hearing about and how they're living in the year 2045 to understand them in more detail. And Bill Nicol has done an extensive amount of work here about some question cards that you could use with children, and so you're giving them some structure here to explore what life might be like in the future. So that's the pedagogy. Sorry, that's the knowledge Crikey. Even so, that's the pedagogy. That's the knowledge Crack. Even I'm getting confused, even I. That's the knowledge is around this as a design strategy of understanding users. So you have a basic case study of what their life is like in a particular context, and then you use some other questions to expand on that and maybe think about what that might be like without being able to talk to that person, and so they're developing a strategy for their toolbox as a design strategy of how to investigate and understand users. So you've you've got that and then you might use some other strategies, like role play. You might teach them how to do role play, um, trying to understand it.

Alison Hardy: 7:11

And again, bill Nichols done some really fantastic research. You know, designing our tomorrows could be really useful, uh, for this sort of thing. That's another pedagogical approach. But it's also got some, you know, hands-on kit where you could, uh, children could use to think about what it's like to be getting older, maybe frailer, maybe weaker, and then you could do a case study on different types of products that are used with people who have different disabilities or different challenges as they're getting older, or different challenges as they're getting older. And so you could, for example, maybe ask a local mobility centre if they've got any devices that you could bring in and they could explore.

Alison Hardy: 7:58

And then you're bringing in new knowledge around anthropometrics, ergonomics, around textures. You introduce them to new language, and then you could introduce this new material and they could generate some design ideas from it and, based on what they know, they've kind of got a specification that they've drafted. That's another piece of design knowledge that you've taught them, and then they're developing these prototypes. Now they can't, they can't make it because the material isn't actually in production. They're projecting into the future and then they could be using the design strategy of design fiction, where they've now built up this whole story. Again, they could use AI now themselves to create images of what this person's home might look like, because they've got a much better understanding, because they've used Bill Nichols' questions to develop a rounder picture of this person and their environment. And then they've got their ideas that they've worked in different teams, in different groups, and again you've used different design strategies that you've taught them that they can use to generate a range of ideas. You've taught them some modeling strategies and it might just be some rough modeling, and then you're teaching them some language that they could use to use as prompts to ask a design, a visual AI tool to generate those ideas, and then they create a story. So they're now building on that case study at the start to create a story. So that's a design and make activity that allows you to use something that's not available in the classroom to think about using a whole load of design strategies, design tools for them to develop to a conceptual idea. And that doesn't have to be a hugely long pedagogical activity and that might just happen over four lessons, for example. So that's the beauty.

Alison Hardy: 9:51

I think of a mainly designing or a designing without making activity. Um, you could say it allows more creativity, but then that's a whole other conversation about what does the research say, about what do we mean by creativity? I need to make a note to myself, that's, that's a whole podcast I could do, um, and then at the other end of the spectrum. So you've got mainly designing at one end and I've kind of talked about mainly designing in a kind of quite extreme end at the spectrum where it's designing for the future with material they don't have access to. Another way you could do mainly designing is you give them some components that they have to work around, or they might do some mainly designing thinking about the unintended consequences of products that already exist. So let's think about that on a spectrum where they can't and do any kind of concrete physical three-dimensional modeling, to where they've actually already given them a product that they're thinking about, what are the unintended consequences? I remember doing an ideo card around this um, you know what are the different functions and uses of a, of a bucket, um, that you could use. So they're all kind of mainly designing without this.

Alison Hardy: 11:01

What people might say is a restriction of being able to make. However, making is a key component of design and technology, and what the research says, sort of beyond design and technology, is when you're teaching children those technological processes where they are learning new making manufacturing processes and skills and they're using them. They need to have an opportunity to practice. So one form of a mainly making activity or a making without designing so you're restricting the design decisions could be very quick in that you're wanting them to practice some particular shaping skills, for example, on a pre-formed piece of acrylic that you've had roughly cut out, whether that's on the bandsaw or whatever, and they're practicing that, and they're practicing drilling a hole so they have a better feel of the material. But they've also had an opportunity to practice. So it can be done as a sort of straightforward as that, because I think I think the advantage of something like mainly making is it takes away from this risk factor of failure because you're building in this opportunity to practice and also you're not restricted by their limited knowledge about manufacturing. So you're going to put in some quite tight constraints on it.

Alison Hardy: 12:29

So this idea about mainly making and they used to be called and the research literature is around this. It's around focused practical tasks. So you know that says it. It's a focused practical task, so it's practical task. So it's got a clear focus, it's got a clear learning objective. And again, if you go on to Hilda Ruth Bowman and Torben Stieg's website dnt4dnt and download the Nuffield resources, there's an awful lot of focused practical tasks where basically, children are having the opportunity to make things without the complication of design decisions, and we need to have design decisions, so let's not say we're doing one or the other all the time. This is a combination of your careful planning that means that they can practice and get a much stronger sense of the feel of the materials, the feels of the processes, of the feel of the materials, the feels of the processes.

Alison Hardy: 13:28

You could say that the sewing machine license that we see a lot happening in lower school and in secondary schools is a form of a focused practical task. However, there are times and I've seen that done in lessons where there's too much brought into it and it's cognitive overload. So a mainly making activity in some ways is taking away some of that cognitive overload. Um. So I think you could think about both of those very carefully. What we tend to see, um and I think this comes out from the literature in Bob McCormick. He doesn't use this language. It's this language that myself and Matt McLean and Sarah Davids have talked about is you basically see a mainly designing activity, mainly making activity, masquerading as a design and make, and what that means is actually, as a teacher, most of the design decisions have been made, so the children have very few.

Alison Hardy: 14:24

You've already decided on the material. The most of the design decisions have been made, so the children have very few. You've already decided on the material, the size of the material, the context, the user, the processes that will be used. That's okay. But don't call it a design and make, because if we think back to Bob McCormick's paper about the ritual of the design project, you can see that very clearly in these design and make activities that are masquerading. You know they're masquerading as design and make. They're not a design and make. They're really a mainly making activity. So I've drawn on some kind of scattergun literature around this because there's not a huge amount out there. But hopefully that's given you some food for thought about how do you build these sorts of pedagogies into your practice alongside the design and make. That builds on and gives opportunity for children to learn and reinforce and practice the knowledge that they're developing in order to grow their design and technology capability. So hopefully that's got you thinking.

Alison Hardy: 15:38

Thanks very much for listening, 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 speakpipe or drop me an email. You can find details about me, the podcast and how to connect with me on my website, drallisonhardycom. Also, if you want to support the podcast financially, you can become a patron. Links to speakpipePipe, patreon and my website are in the show notes. Thanks for listening.