GoodbyeOverdraft HelloWallet
Is it just me, or do retail banking services in the UK seem to innovate at the speed of rowing through treacle? From a customer’s perspective, online banking has remained the same for years. My bank (which prides itself on customer service) provides a website that looks pretty much the same as the very first online banking interface I used about ten years ago.
In the past, holding too many bank accounts with different banks and forgetting how much was in each has got me into trouble, but the first I knew of it would be a sneaky letter telling me that my “request for an informal overdraft” had been successful at a cost of fifty quid.
While some services like the US-based Mint offer account aggregation and infographics to help people keep on top of their finances, their competitors struggle to get noticed and fail – particularly on this side of the Atlantic. Wesabe lasted five years, Kublax couldn’t raise funding, and MoneyDashboard doesn’t seem (without having used it) to have the design or user experience to connect with the general population.
There’s more than just innovation for innovation’s sake here. For example at last week’s Benefits Camp, organised by FutureGov to devise ways of helping change and improve the benefits system, personal finance apps able to integrate a person’s benefits were mooted. Research conducted by the Brookings Institution over the last few years notes that (in the US at least) lower income individuals often end up paying over the odds for basic financial services, cars and mortgages.
In fact, in a nice example of being a “think & do” research organisation, Brookings Institution fellow Matt Fellowes later launched HelloWallet, a personal finance service. HelloWallet reckon that “hundreds of billions of dollars unnecessarily lost by middle- and low-income workers because of avoidable financial missteps”. Their service provides tailored advice and tools to help users get out of debt, create budgets and increase their savings.
I guess that my question is: why not here – why is there still no HelloWallet (or Mint) for the UK? Are the problems technical, regulatory, or with customers? Could the RSA do something here? Perhaps someone with more understanding from today’s BarCampBankLondon could shed some light…
Pushing at an Open Door
On Tuesday the Lords discussed on the recently published Restarting Britain: Design Education and Growth from the Design Commission. The transcript of the debate provides interesting reading – partly for the way in which the Lords interpret the word ‘design’, drawing on their personal stories: working as trend spotters in the fashion industry, establishing technical colleges to teach hand skills, or simply owning a Lachasse suit. Below are a few snippets.
The Lords raised the design community’s old grievance that their skills are often misunderstood:
“…many people regard design as largely concerned with aesthetics or with products such as furniture or ceramics. As a result, they regard it as a marginal issue-something that is good and desirable but not essential.”
They affirmed that certain important capabilities are effectively learned through design training:
“Design teaches “a problem-solving approach; the capacity to work collaboratively; interdisciplinary capability; taking into account the participation of the end-user … and the habit, and satisfaction, of creating projects which work … [these qualities] are … hard to acquire from other subjects.”
Most frequently they noted – unsurprisingly given the report’s title – that design is critical to the UK’s economy:
“…our education system needs to be design-linked with technology for the future, for our economy and, most importantly, for jobs”
“One distinguished magazine editor told me that British designers are the creative engine of the French fashion industry. We seem to be able to produce design talent but it appears that we just do not know how to use, develop and nurture it.”
“…we have grown used to hearing it bruited about that the UK’s record of scientific invention and the great strength of its creative industries-product design, architecture, fashion, media, games software, entertainment and advertising-would equip us well enough for the future. However… the uncomfortable truth is that, with a few very honourable exceptions, we have not been good enough at carrying these capabilities through into consistently world-beating products and services.”
The eulogies for design continued, with the accusation implied that the Government was not taking Design-with-a-capital-D sufficiently seriously. Baroness Wilcox hit back on behalf of DBIS:
“While we welcome the commission’s contribution to this important subject, we must dispute the suggestion that the Government do not fully appreciate design as a lever for growth … We do not see it as “whimsical”, which I heard Sir Paul Smith say was the view of design that many people have when they should be looking at the beautiful design of an engine or water bottle. He actually said that design “isn’t all red hair and bare chests” when he was interviewed this morning about the relocation of the Design Museum.”
Leaving the red hair and bar chests aside, her response gave the impression that the Design Commission were pounding on an open door, but the contribution that struck me as most thoughtful was from Baroness Morris:
“I have never known anyone who was against design. There is no army of people out there making a case against it. Sometimes when that happens, because there is no core to the debate, you find that everyone thinks that it is a good thing but no one really fights for it to be as good as it could be.”
She advocated that rather than top-down directives on design education, more demand creation (as exemplified by the Design Council’s Designing Demand programme, I suppose) could be a better route:
“…it is all too easy to say that if we made [design] compulsory for every child in every year of schooling the problems would be solved, but I am not sure that that is the case. The more difficult task is to win the case and make it so good that schools want to teach it and children want to learn it. Sometimes, giving something the hook of compulsion actually makes you take your foot off the accelerator in making it a very good subject.”
Which to me at least, seems like a more designerly approach.
People, Patterns and Problems
Here are some quick thoughts on a new project that I’ve been wondering about – what do readers think?
The sheer complexity of social problems at local and national level can leave public servants, volunteer groups, social entrepreneurs and others feeling powerless. Of course there are a multitude of successful case studies, ‘best practice’ and promising ideas, but it can be difficult (arguably impossible) to adapt ‘solutions’ that have worked in one instance to new contexts with different characteristics.
Dave Snowden and Mary Boone argue in their 2007 article for Harvard Business Review (requires a subscription) that relying on ‘best practice’ is powerless to tackle problems in complex systems. They compare simple, complicated and complex structures and show that unlike the other two, complex systems are dynamic, and comprise large numbers of elements interacting with each other in unpredictable ways. Rather than imposing fixes, Snowden and Boone suggest that trouble-shooters in such a situation must step back and allow potential solutions to emerge.
Their paper is a persuasive argument against best practice and challenges the orthodoxy of ‘evidence based policymaking’ – but I don’t think it means public servants faced with tricky problems in complex systems must always start from a blank sheet.
For example, technical innovators often solve simple and complicated problems by applying past solutions, but also learn from the past in order to solve complex problems. However rather than directly deploying a known fix (likely to fail for the reasons above), they use abstract principles derived from past solutions. This allows past solutions to inform new ideas indirectly.
For example, databases of granted patents (which contain novel solutions to technical problems) were analysed to develop the TRIZ problem-solving system. Similarly, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language presents a typology of architectural principles that allow others to solve problems in the built environment. Design firm IDEO publish Patterns, recording recurring insights gleaned from past design projects as an aide-memoire.
So could a similar set of principles be devised to solve social problems across different contexts? Perhaps through a meta-analysis of policies, programmes and interventions that showed some success (with reference to the characteristics of the environment in which they worked), more abstract pointers could be developed that give public servants a starting point, or some promising lines of enquiry.
Good idea or a silly one? Perhaps such a database and set of principles already exists? Would the methodology work, or should it be done in a different way? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
The Virtual Day in Court
What’s the missing word?
“Good ██████ keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended.” Raymond Loewy
“People think that ██████ is styling. ██████ is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good ██████ is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.” Paola Antonelli
“██████ is not the narrow application of formal skills, it is a way of thinking.” Chris Pullman
It is of course – Design. It’s a common complaint (at least from designers) that design is misunderstood as a fundamentally superficial activity, but over the last five years the message is getting through. Design is now being championed in previously unlikely places – particularly on issues of public service reform. As Lord Bichard, previously Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education and Employment said:
“Many people think of design in terms of packaging and product design. They don’t realise design tools can go far beyond that, and can cause you to ask serious questions about business vision and service vision. Design is very much addressing the relationship with clients, customers and citizens and is relevant to the public sector, not least around services.”
However there are still fields where good design is unheard and unthought of, though the approach could play a valuable role. In one example, courtrooms across the country are planning enormous change, as the Ministry of Justice makes changes to balance its budget. As the BBC reported last week, one of the primary ideas they are testing is to increase the use of videoconferencing technology in court, allowing witnesses and defendants to give evidence remotely, potentially saving time and money.
Today we publish a report that looks at this exact issue: how could better design improve the productivity and experience of appearing in court? Drawing on an expert seminar hosted earlier this year by the RSA and Cisco during which we heard from academic researchers, legal professionals and designers, we explore how design could improve the development of such ‘Virtual Courts’, which have proved controversial for a number of reasons – some fearing that the technology could undermine the gravitas of courtroom events, or even bring threats to justice.
Our report argues that the planned extensions of the virtual courts pilots should put ‘design thinking’ at their centre to resolve these potential issues, for example by:
- Involving all court users (magistrates, defendants, interpreters, solicitors and more) to generate ideas to improve stakeholders’ experience of new technologies in court
- Rapidly testing ideas with court users, prior to pilots, to reduce the risk of failure further down the line – as well as suggesting more ideas to improve other parts of the system
- Embedding design thinking into the organisational culture of agencies in the criminal justice system to encourage on-going innovation
The full report is available for download or reading online in the Design section of the RSA’s website.
The crack is how the light gets in
The Guardian and the LSE have just published findings from their research on the riots. This is really really worth a read and a watch. However, anyone with any experience of youth work with marginalised young people will not be at all surprised. This is a bit of a reflection of some of my own work and a call for better ideas!
A digested read, digested, of the topline tells us that “Widespread anger and frustration at the way police engage with communities was a significant cause of the summer riots” with deep-rooted “distrust and antipathy toward police”. A feeling of injustice and alienation pervaded the various reasons cited for the riots- from lack of jobs and opportunity; to scrapping the EMA; to how they felt they were treated compared with others.
It was acknowledged that the form the riots took (e.g. looting) was essentially due to opportunism given a “perceived suspension of normal rules”- people felt this was an unusual chance to get away with it. Social networking sites were seen as mere corollaries to the main facts – although Blackberry messenger was seen as being crucial – and it was found that far from being centered around gangs, the riots were actually a reflection of an unprecedented ‘truce’ which allowed people to cross postcode lines.
“Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
This all took me back into work I conducted in Camden on young people’s social networks with the fantastic charity PanArts. The social world inhabited by the young people in the Synergy project – which aimed to unite young people divided by endz gangfare- was typical of this. If they wanted young people from, say, NW5 to go to a youth centre in NW3, they needed a mini-bus.
The young men that took part in the arts projects were incredibly affectionate between themselves – playing with each other’s hair and clothing – but untrusting of others: “they do have to look over their shoulders all the time” (PanArts worker, 2010). They were never still, always on the look-out for danger, and always in friction with the police.
This friction might be expressed in police de-facto stopping youth club meetings by imposing a curfew on the area, or the anger-inducing story of a young man who left all his friends and networks behind to go on to bigger things, yet found that once he had left Camden to learn new skills, Camden could not leave him. Whilst in the centre of London attending a prestigious arts training course he was stopped and searched by police who informed his new friends who knew nothing of his background that he was a ‘repeat offender’ who they should not be spending time with.
As expressed by PanArts in an interview with me at the time:
“ A lot of the kids we work with don’t have that belief that society is working ultimately for their good, so those micro-systems [of trust] are what they latch onto, well possibly because it is all they have got… and because they like being able to trust people… and tell their secrets and have fun”
Human beings need identities, and when they are shut out from mainstream society, they form their own. Youth culture has historically always been about forming identities: our identity is what we barter our social capital on. Social capital is not always ‘positive’, it merely describes human interactions. A sense of community is not solely about geographical proximity, it is about who we recognise as ‘like us’.
Gangs are not the problem. What is worrying is marginalised groups who feel they are not part of mainstream society, who feel that they are treated different to everyone else, handed a rawer deal than everyone else, who experience suicidal levels of disinterest in what happens to them as they feel they have nothing to lose. Anger at police, is essentially anger at how representatives of the state interact with you. Researchers for the LSE/Guardian reported being repeatedly asked “This is nothing to do with the government right, this is nothing to do with the police, right?
We are seeing the formation of “some neighbourhoods that are effectively somewhere else from the rest of society”, and we can all see the cracks in the perfect offering of a supposedly meritocratic ‘open-opportunity’ society. The question is, what are we going to do about it?
I would love to see what would happen if we were to run a service re-design project with young people affected by the riots or gang violence. Co-production has been used to great effect in many arena: what happens if you ask people “Right, this is our budget, these are all the people we need to provide for: how would you do youth services? How would you ensure something of a fairer deal?”
Or maybe you have a far better idea: the RSA has just launched a interactivism challenge with Google “ asking people of all backgrounds – software developers, young people, professional practitioners, teachers and policymakers of all levels – to put forward innovative ideas for how the internet and technology could support young people.” What can you build?
We have heard the bells, and we have seen the cracks. Is it maybe time to let the light in?
The iPod of Thermostats
It’s a hideous cliché for product companies to say that their product is “the iPod of…” breadmakers, shopping trolleys, remote controls or whatever they make (though just another indication of how Apple have raised the profile of good design). But one product launch that took place yesterday had more right to use this title than most. Tony Fadell was a senior executive of Apple’s iPod division until 2008, but has more recently started Nest, a product development company.
Nest’s first product is the iPod of (sorry) thermostats. It’s simple, intelligent (its main selling point is that it ‘learns’ from the way you live) and wouldn’t look out of place in a Foster + Partners home (if they made homes). It’s an interesting example because thermostats are exactly the kind of product that are traditionally heavy on features and light on desirability and ‘human interface’.
Developing the last point, cognitive scientist and designer Don Norman used thermostats in his Design of Everyday Things (one of the inspirations for Thaler & Sunstein’s Nudge) to illustrate how the human interface of a thermostat often fails to match a homeowner’s mental model of their central heating system. Norman writes that people often think of the thermostat as either a valve (in which turning the dial up increases the amount of heat flowing through the system) or a timer (in which turning the dial up makes the system respond more quickly). Both are wrong, and both illustrate a problem with how people understand thermostats (for more see this post from Rattle Research and this post in response by Dan Lockton).
Why does this matter? Well, while possessing products that are well-designed might fulfil some of our desires, it also has an impact on big social and environmental problems. ‘Space heating’ is the highest percentage (61%) of domestic energy consumption in the UK (domestic energy is itself 32% of the UK’s overall) and with sky-high energy prices, more falling into fuel poverty & climate change, it becomes more important than ever that we can clearly understand and manage the energy we use. The way that we interact with our home’s central heating system directly affects our energy consumption.
Nest seem to be motivated by trends like these. They reckon that thermostats control about 50% of a US household’s energy bill, and that a well-designed and properly programmed device will be an attractive proposition to consumers. We’ll wait and see I guess (there’s price premium of about $100 more than competitors), but it could be another example of great product design not only making consumers happier, but also helping to solving social problems. As Nest’s website says: “Technology should be about more than newest, loudest, prettiest. It should make a difference”.
Think Different, Think Less?
Yesterday I passed the Covent Garden Apple Store, which has attracted a collection of flowers and tributes to co-founder, CEO and chairman Steve Jobs. His premature death and the global reaction has provoked widespread analysis into exactly what it is that he did so successfully. The Economist in particular have published a number of features on Jobs, as well as a timely special report on personal technology. Apple, the author of this report notes, “has indeed ushered in a new era in which personal technology is finally living up to its name. That is because the technology is starting to adapt to the people who use it rather than forcing them to adapt to it.”
Apple products like the iPhone are brilliantly easy to use, making advanced technology available and useful to everyday users. Apple’s designers are world class at devising and developing products (each of which are marked “Designed by Apple in Cupertino”) that help their customers navigate the strange new world that technology brings – often by making things as simple as possible. The most remarkable feature of the latest iPhone is Siri, a new feature that draws on Natural Language Processing to let users set reminders, send messages and do many more tasks simply through voice command. “The intelligent assistant that helps you get things done” has been received well by early adopters who claim it works with the ease they expect from Apple: “remarkably good at interpreting instructions and turning them into actions” one reviewer said.
Here at the RSA, we sometimes describe our mission as being to understand and enhance human capabilities in order to meet the challenges that we face in the 21st century. Our practical work demonstrates this through projects that explore how we can more effectively understand our brains, our place in the community, our ability to become more resourceful and so on. Personal technology, like smartphones and apps, also promises enhance our capabilities; for example helping us to manage large amounts of information in order to make better decisions. But as Marshall McLuhan wrote (almost fifty years ago) in Understanding Media: “The medium gives power through extension but immobilizes and paralyzes what it extend. In this sense, technologies both extend and amputate”.
The Economist report that sales of tablets and smartphones are expected to overtake sales of PCs this year, and projected to reach 10 billion mobile connected devices by 2020. But although personal technology is increasingly pervasive, it’s unusual to see balanced commentary on the effect of innovations like Siri on people’s capabilities. On the one hand, we say that personal technology is a tool that extends and empowers us. Towards the more neo-luddite / amputation end of the spectrum, we say that sat-navs dissuade us from making mental maps of an area, calculators make us worse at mental arithmetic and word-processing software ruins our spelling and handwriting. [When the media does note downsides to personal technology, they’re usually restricted to privacy concerns and surveillance (including sousveillance).]
Designers often strive to make things as simple as possible for the user, but are there ever situations in which too much simplicity becomes disempowering and creates dependencies in the long term? Should personal technology (hardware or apps) be designed to encourage the user to think and engage, rather than passively accept defaults? If so, how should these design decisions be made; are there principles that could guide interaction designers to decide when to protect the user from unnecessary details, and when to provoke action? What would Marshall McLuhan say about the iPhone and Siri, and what would Steve Jobs think about all this?
I’m sure interaction designers, cognitive ergonomists and others have been exploring questions like these for years. I’d love to hear about any examples of products or interfaces that are designed in a way that reinforces rather diminishes their users’ independent capabilities.
Week 13,433
Through London design firm BERG’s blog, I’ve come across the practice of writing a ‘weeknote’; a reflection of what’s going on with the team each Friday. Encouraging people to be more reflective is an aspect of lots of the RSA’s work, for example in human behaviour and education. It seems natural to try one for the RSA’s Design team. This is actually week 13,433 for the RSA (which is a little intimidating). So what’s going on?
The Design team are working at desks in the ‘Oval Office’, which is half grey and half yellow – and only half oval. In plan, the room is rectangular with a curved wall at one end. We sit at the non-curved end, and our three windows look across John Adam Street to the second floor of the Adelphi building. Each window goes all the way from the floor almost to the ceiling. Moving anticlockwise…
Matt is wearing a blue T-shirt and peering intently into his screen. He’s creating a series of icons in Illustrator that the Connected Communities team can use to help people understand their social networks. This is a real information design problem; often the data that is collected through social network analyses is complicated and difficult to communicate. Matt’s icons will represent the type of relationship between two people, and how strong it is.
Emily has just sent off the text for the new Design & Society pamphlet – Nabeel Hamdi’s essay Architecture, Improvisation and the Energy of Place, accompanied by our Resourceful Architect call for Ideas and a review of the shortlist. She’s also working furiously on the schemes of work for the Design Faculty of the new Creative Education Trust Academies in Rugeley – great opportunity to respond to the critiques of DT that arose in our What’s Wrong with DT? pamphlet and Ian McGimpsey’s lit review. Naturally beginning to fret over her ten minute presentation at the forthcoming RSA Trustees meeting on 14th September.
Sevra is typing away and drinking her beloved iced coffee. She has just launched this year’s Student Design Awards, and is working with design tutors across the country to help them integrate the briefs into their curricula. As with all the Design team’s projects, each brief asks designers to demonstrate how the insights and processes of design can increase the resourcefulness of people and communities.
Melanie is sitting very upright and working on 75 Days; a skills bank that connects Royal Designers’ expertise to projects led by RSA staff or Fellows that could benefit. She’s just connected Geoff Kirk, retired chief design aero-engineer from Rolls Royce with the RSA’s Academy. Geoff and the Academy staff are going to challenge students to design a toy based on a scientific principle, getting them to research, design and make a prototype.
Looking at my colleagues has made me realise I was slouching. I’m writing a new draft of a report that explores how ‘design thinking’ could benefit public services; specifically improve the experience of being in court. The report follows on from an RSA seminar earlier in the summer. Lots of projects have looked at the value of design in public services, but courtrooms are interesting because they have such strong heritage, and deal with issues like justice and truth.
Important stories are being observed and understood by a select few while the rest of us see only pretty pictures
We’ve all seen the infographics in the Guardian supplements or on the BBC News website: they’re colourful, engaging and communicate large amounts of information over relatively small press space. We understand them on a fundamental level. Network visualisations on the other hand seem to alienate the majority and by their very nature are too complicated. Huge amounts of valuable data become beautiful amorphic pictures that fail to communicate important stories to a broader audience.
Upon looking at complex network visualisations one gets a sense of ‘geekiness’ for want of a better word, with a Zuckerberg/Silicon valley flavour to them (which could of course be because of the number of social network based visualisations that are out there due to the recent availability of data from these sources), academic elitism that boggles the minds of everyday people. Often I feel the aesthetic runs the risk of intimidating a more general audience because they are unintuitive, not engaging and too much like something you might see in a physics text book. The revelations can be lost in the context of the network as a whole because they can be overwhelming.
This is of course a real shame as the power of large, complex data sets can be invaluable, tend to come from extremely credible sources and are often the result of extensive and timely research. There is also a good chance that a large amount of information may be lost because it is not displayed in a way that allows it to be properly understood by a broader audience. Important stories are being observed and understood by a select few while the rest of us see only pretty pictures.
My role as the Connected Communities and Design intern here at the RSA is to develop a process to visualise large complex networks in a manner that is engaging, holistic and intuitive. These will be used to communicate stories within the network to a number of potential audiences; academics, policy makers, respondents to the surveys that the visualisations will seek to represent, the press and general public.
Moving forward I will aim to cater to all groups and will be exploring the middle ground between infographics and network visualisation and perhaps tying the two together. Data sets will be explored and visualised in network visualisation software (such as Gephi or UCINET) and then exported and rearranged/designed in a style that allows stories to be more easily extrapolated from the mass of data. The designs will need to vary depending on the audience and the story being told. Our visualisation process will allow for additional simplification and explanatory layers to be added to the initial complex picture.
Here is a network that has been visualised in Gephi using the Force Atlas 2 algorithm. With the use of a key one can begin to understand the network, identifying attribute categories which both yield the most connections and are most central to the network. Gephi allows visualisations to be exported as vector files, offering a level of zoom that makes intricate details within the visualisation clear to see. There is also a plug-in called ‘Seadragon Web Export’ which exports visualisations that are embeddable in any web browser allowing smooth network exploration using zoom and pan tools. Click on the image to enlarge.
I will aim to strike a balance between displaying the true network to highlight the presence and scale of complexity (a vital part of understanding a network as a whole) with additional graphic design elements, icons, familiar tools of measure and small amounts of text to better tell specific stories within the data. It is my hope that insight and perspective will be easier to gain by displaying these graphics side by side with the complex network visualisations – not only by academics but by all of us alike
As outlined at the start the nature of visualising large networks will bring with it inherent difficulties. Combined with these are the challenges associated with catering to multiple audiences. I come from a graphic design background and am trying to solve these problems in that vein. I intend to post ideas and mock-ups as I go and would gratefully welcome any advice, ideas or suggestions.
Here is an example to showcase some graphic techniques which could be used to better communicate stories within complex networks. Illustrated here are the personal networks of the most and least connected people within the employment categories 'Retired', 'Other' and 'Unemployed'. A magnification also offers more detail into the most connected retired persons personal network. Finally the personal network of the most connectected person within the entire network is displayed (the Postman). Click on the image to enlarge.
Design’s imperfect proxy
Congratulations to the Design & Technology Association, Seymour Powell and the James Dyson Foundation for the excellent event they put together on July 12th to debate the question “Is Creative Britain in Reverse?” Compliments also on the ‘manifesto video’ they launched that night which has gone viral in the intervening time.
The Coalition Government’s curriculum review, likely to strip Design and Technology (aka ‘DT’) of its compulsory status at Key Stage 3 (roughly corresponding to ages 11-14 in the pre-GCSE period of school life) was the occasion for this debate. Eloquently setting the scene, Deyan Sudjic mused that ‘Design puts you at the centre of things, not the periphery’. Others in the film talked persuasively about how badly we need design. While Ellen MacArthur couched it in the environmental imperative to ‘use things, not use them up’, David Kester declared design ‘absolutely essential to our economic growth and success’.
Neither I nor anyone else in the audience that evening would likely demur. The rub happens when you substitute DT for ‘design’. First I heard that DT ‘teaches children to think for themselves’, ‘gives children a reason for applying their literacy and numeracy’ and gives them ‘a broader set of choices’ about the future. Hmmm. Then I heard that ‘the design education system will collapse if DT is stripped of its compulsory status’. Skepticism is now making me wince, because it’s all true about design, but DT is an imperfect proxy.
Finally I heard ‘We would not have our creative industries if DT had not been introduced into the curriculum’. Ah yes: the creative industries. By this giddy phrase do we not mean design and art direction, film, tv and media production, publishing and music, not to mention the arts per se as they can be commercialised? And do these activities not depend just as much on ‘artistic’ intelligence as they do on Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths? Enter the elephant in the room, Art, and that other subject in the National Curriculum, Art and Design. Is the panel happy, I asked, with the divorce from Art that the National Curriculum perpetuated? To be fair, the panel weren’t happy; certainly Dick Powell vigorously acknowledged that the divorce was wrong.
Back to DT, the imperfect proxy for design: RSA Design and RSA Education have jointly commissioned two pieces of work to begin to answer the inauspicious question ‘What’s wrong with DT?’ John Miller’s essay, here, analyses the reasons why DT has failed to break the bounds of its pre-National Curriculum antecedents in Art, Craft & Design and Home Economics, and has not become the place where students explore how to create a better world.
We asked Ian McGimpsey to answer the question in a different way, by reviewing the academic literature on DT since its establishment in the National Curriculum. His review, here, suggests that DT has tried to be too many things to too many people, rather than focusing on its own worth and integrity as a subject area. By claiming to be supremely inter-disciplinary, and a solution to Britain’s global competitiveness via an often tenuous relation to STEM, DT has been preoccupied in over-justifying its place on the curriculum to the detriment of the subject itself.
Rather than defending DT, can we use the new curriculum freedoms, afforded by the Government’s diversion to assessing performance in ‘E-Bac’ core subjects, to reform DT? To re-couple Art with Design and to give purpose to Craft, Technology and ICT under the banner of design. Because it’s true: understanding design will give children a broader set of choices about what we do with and in the world. Just don’t call it DT.
RSA Animate
RSA Mobile
Design and Society Bloggers
Sevra Davis trained as an architect and urban designer and worked in both of these roles prior to coming to the RSA. She currently runs the national RSA Student Design Awards programme, thinking up design challenges for students that will address pressing social issues.
Jamie Young trained in product design and environmental policy and worked as a design engineer before joining the RSA. He has run several research projects and practical interventions at the RSA to encourage sustainable behaviour change, social innovation and better use of technology by society at large. Follow @dt99jay