Is it time to split – for design’s sake

Art, Craft and Design - think piece 2

“Design is that area of human experience, skill and knowledge which is concerned with man’s ability to mould his environment to suit his material and spiritual needs.”

Archer, B (1973) “The Need for Design Education.” Royal College of Art

In this article I want to explore the premise that we should seek greater separation of art and design from design technology.  Not to suggest that one subject has greater value than the other, but rather, that both subjects have immense value, which the EBacc and curriculum pressures threaten to destroy at the current time. I also want to explore why there might be an issue in the perception of value of these subjects by legislators and school management teams. Despite the protestations of the current secretary of state and his schools minister that there is plenty of space in the curriculum for schools to offer what they wish, inevitably we are seeing cuts in non-EBacc GCSE courses and a move towards cuts in secondary school’s, in FE and also in HE in these and other arts subjects.  There are a number of reasons for this, of which, funding cuts and course viability are just two.  This does not bode well for the creative future of our country and the work of the creative industries, as one of the four great financial and industry successes for the UK over the last 60 years.  Lastly, I want to reclaim the word 'design', giving it equal weight within art and design and suggest we have much more to learn and teach through the consideration of stages in the design process, when developing knowledge and skills in a design discipline.

The current curriculum review might want to look at how the curriculum is organised in other countries, rather than just look at performance data. Ministers should look instead at the pathways from schools and colleges that feed successful industries, and consider the high level of self-employed statistics in the design and media industries, compared to other forms of industry employment.  Several years ago I took a group of teachers to Idaho in the USA to look at their creative curriculum. Interestingly, what impressed me most wasn’t their art and design but their ‘Sci/Tech’.  A combined science and technology curriculum that treated technology more as an industry focused subject, applying technology for science and design.  Students could see the purpose and value of both the science and technology when both were applied and when design and manufacturing link fully to this. Attitudes of staff and students were different to those we sometimes find in the UK.  There was real excitement in the classrooms.  Students’ were passionate about their learning. 

Students in a high school in Idaho, engage in applied design technology in Sci/Tech lessons, exploring biology by measuring the impact on reaction times of the human body during multi-axis working in low-gravity situations using a gyroscopic rig that they had built. Other students purposefully play ‘robot wars’ to learn how to maximise programming language and improve their engineering design and build skills.

In the UK, I sometimes wonder what type of learning I am seeing when in DT or art and design lessons.  I rarely hear the word ‘design’ mentioned in an art and design lesson, or indeed, ‘manufacture’, ‘innovate’, ‘define’ or ‘prototype’. Teachers task students to create a ‘set of studies’, ‘plan out’ or ‘sketch some ideas’.  It is no surprise therefore that design does not have the meaning in art and design that it once had and risks breaking links with the applied arts and design industries in the minds of the student. In DT, design is in some contexts, too often reduced to a process of pre-determined steps reducing creative thinking and origination to a narrowly defined exercise in styling, rather than a fundamental focus on the purpose and function of the product.  It has always seemed to me, that in design technology they should exploit the physical and visual characteristics of materials through applied innovation, determining form, function and cost effectiveness as part of a ‘design for industrial manufacturing processes’ approach. Whereas, in art and design we are most concerned with innovation in styling, concept and the balance between form and function, marketing, advertising, visual communication and the association of product with meaning.  Inevitably there is a degree of overlap, but the question of how much does need to be addressed.

Examples of two very different approaches within art and design and textiles from George Abbot and The Howard of Effingham schools in Surrey. Both showing very high standards of design skills, creative and critical understanding amongst their students.

I also need to state the following.  Graphical Products is not the same as ‘Graphics’ and similarly, Textiles Technology is not the same as ‘Textiles’.  These courses prepare students for different progression routes and aim towards different aspects of related industries.  But they are not fully inter-changeable.  They share certain aspects of a medium and set of processes, but should apply the learning in very different ways. The degree to which they develop similar skills is open to question.  I believe examination boards have much to answer for in not making these courses sufficiently distinct.  By not doing so, they at least mislead students, certainly confuse the purpose underlying the development of these skills and contribute to misinforming senior leaders in their planning of curriculum opportunity.

Is this heresy or the truth?  Too many art and design departments have not been able to run a graphics course because the perception of the senior leadership team is that this is already offered in DT, even when the teacher with a degree in Graphic Design happens to be the Head of Art and Design.  The same is true of textiles.  Similarly, students on DT courses regularly tell me that they intend to become graphic designers or work in fashion design.  The numbers gaining entry to such degree level courses through DT remains a very low percentage, because HE still require A Level art and design experience and skills. Switching to art and design following a DT GCSE may be something that such students find hard.  This is partly because of a skills mismatch, but mainly because of a fundamental difference in the approach in these subjects to design, to creative investigation and the values we place on expression and emotional forms of meaning in art and design.

Who is at fault here?  I have already suggested that exam boards should do more to make these courses more clearly representative of the progression routes and industry opportunities they target.  But we can also identify that many of the teachers offering these within DT come from an art and design college background. They are working in DT departments because for many years this was where they could find employment and career opportunities to teach broadly within their design specialism.  There are two main reasons for this.  Firstly, DT was mandatory under previous versions of the national curriculum, so students could choose specialist GCSEs from a range of technology options. Secondly, at this time, many art and design departments retrenched into their fundamental creative learning and teaching approach which sought to broaden fine art.  Our National Curriculum programmes of study specified nothing mandatory and left the creative direction to the individual teacher and department. Departments who had previously offered graphics and textiles were stopped from doing so, to avoid students taking two GCSEs seen as being essentially the same, although taught in different departments. This may have seemed barely acceptable at the time, over the years it may not have appeared to be a problem, but in fact it has left us with dwindling budgets, ageing equipment, too little ICT and narrowing skill sets within the teaching team.

This situation could be described as slowly shooting ourselves in the foot, particularly when we consider the current context of the EBacc.  This is because the creative flexibility of art and design infers that we do not appear to require specific dedicated specialist equipment and accommodation, or specialist teacher skills. In other words, if you are a senior leader and you have a specialist graphical products or textiles technology teacher with specialist rooms and a software update contract, you would opt to run these courses to make good use of your resources. You would suggest that your art and design staff teach fine art or unendorsed art and design, because they appear to be able to do this without anything more than any art room, their existing funding, a collection of old hand tools, paint, drawing media and plenty of paper. This has been the driver to the status quo for some years and this will become more rigorous as a test, as pressures from the EBacc curriculum increase. However, teaching only unendorsed art and design or fine art is unbalancing the subject and resulting in a reduced skill set and experience of staff, not to mention a shifting popular perception that art and design is just Art (read fine art) and that DT is a broad ranging technologically connected group of subjects.

This situation has been further embedded by the retirement of art and design teachers with a background in sculpture, ceramics, graphics and textiles, accelerated as departments have shrunk somewhat.  Any replacement has predominantly come from a fine art background; limiting the breadth of experience in the team, and reducing their capacity to offer an endorsed specialism in other areas.  In recent years, such courses have dropped in numbers, with the exception of perhaps photography, which continues to grow in response to demand, cultural relevance to young people and the flexibility of facilities that digital media technologies offer.

At the same time as we have been narrowing our curriculum breadth, we may also have been developing a particular perception of design within our use of sketchbooks.  I think we should develop greater rigour to the stages of design we teach, to better promote the development of a definition of purpose, research, investigation, experimentation, creative and critical thinking through stages towards the prototyping, selection, realisation and manufacture of an outcome (fine art, design or craft based). Implicit in this is the broadening of the language we use in art and design departments, to help build a wider understanding of design, connect with the applied arts, with industry and give structure to design thinking and actions as part of the creative process.

This may seem over simplified and may not be the true picture within your department or particularly within a large department in a specialist arts college.  However, I believe we demean both subjects by failing to focus on the purpose of their core learning, which should be set in a context of industry relevant specialism.  Art and design departments could begin by no longer calling themselves ‘Art’.  They can also stop others from referring to them in such a limiting fashion and broaden their curriculum and design processes to reflect a greater breadth of art, craft and design. At the same time, senior leadership teams are under immense pressure to ensure their GCSE and A level offer provides breadth and whatever the morality of this situation, they are under pressure to push some GCSE subjects into the margins by the introduction of the EBacc, chopping small subject numbers at A Level due to funding cuts.  They in turn rely on examination boards to offer purposeful courses with realistic expectations of progression routes to further and higher education and employment.  Examination Boards who allow their examinations to become distorted by the preference of some teachers to teach styling over design, and process over a real industry skills and context, should think again at the damage being done to the careers of teachers and life chances of young people who aspire to real jobs in creative, media, design, engineering and manufacturing industries in this country. As part of the curriculum review maybe it is time to seek some clarity.  Maybe it is time to redefine the scope of those courses that share the title of Design.

Ged Gast July 2011