Reclaiming the 'D' word in art and design

To start with, let’s just consider the word ‘design’.  A ‘design’ refers to the evidence of design, the visual record of the design process or a thing that has been designed. ‘Designing’ infers an active process of selecting and organising the visual and physical elements to fulfil a broad, specific or defined purpose which may be aesthetic, functional or both. This process is both physical and intellectual, calling on the experience of the designer in the creation of new artefacts and products to meet the needs of users, or in the visual communication of information, ideas and meanings.


There are many different models of the design process, with variations that apply to diverse strands of activity across the enormous range of design industries.  They mostly share many of the same stages although they place a different emphasis on these depending on the intended purpose and outcome. However, the principle of the thinking and actions underpinning these stages is important, when we consider which design skills and design thinking approaches we will teach and how we will teach this.


These process stages can be summarised as the following:

■      Define - the identification of need or specification including customer/user profile.

■      Research - identifying all salient information needed to complete the design including customer/user profiles, markets, purpose, need, previous similar products, stylistic influences, preferences and cost effectiveness, but also early investigation and media experimentation.

■      Imagine/Ideate - Idea generation (key to innovation and creative development).

■      Refine - the development of the idea, through stages that improve the outcome (including further experimentation and investigation).

■      Prototype/visualise - the modelling and creation/manufacture of versions to enable definitive testing or consideration against the brief/intention.

■      Implement - the selection and move to final production, realisation or manufacture.

■      Evaluate - a QA process that seeks to confirm the effectiveness of the outcome/s.

This image is from A Level Textiles at George Abbot School, Guildford. With thanks to the department for their permission to use this image.

Whilst this broadly defined process would seem to model an industrial process more familiar with the functional design and manufacture of engineered products or electrical goods, it can equally describe the design and development processes for the creation of fine art, fashion, textiles, graphical products, photography, jewellery, sculpture; craft products and all visual art outcomes including film, digital lens and screen based media.  The process can also be linear, but does not have to remain so and can be treated far more flexibly when not part of a larger commercial process.  However, I do believe that students must have creative experience with this process, both as intellectual and physical stages, each with distinct characteristics, knowledge and skills.  The two images below share a similar aesthetic and are closely related in time.  At design stages they surely shared similar elements of visual design, and yet the outcomes are very different. Do we draw connections and make this clear enough in our teaching of design?

Perhaps we think of art as one type of outcome and design as another, leading to different kinds of product? If this is so, we may be misleading young people in schools if they do not see the 'design' in the 'art', and vice versa  After all, a painting is just as much a product, as an illustration, a piece of bespoke jewellery, a bowl, a photograph or a digital game.

In a student sketchbook, we generally see much research and some development in the refining of an idea towards a suitable conclusion, leading to a painting, a piece of craft, print or sculpture. Increasingly, not all design stages (identified above) will have been as carefully explored when developing a fine art outcome. Less thinking will have been invested in defining the purpose, audience and point of display, or in the refinement of the idea or prototyping to ensure the investment of time is well spent before creating the final outcome? I am not suggesting we adopt a tight linear model, or that we follow all of the steps in every project.  By not developing a thorough design experience, including an understanding of the thinking processes and skills, we are certainly missing some of the rigour we expect from the thinking and design development at each stage in the creative process.  Equally, students will not gain the ‘bigger picture’ of design or understand the breadth of career opportunity available.

 In the design world, most ‘design briefs’ are developed in response to a client, where the product or outcome will generally be a functional (if not a tactile) product.  We know that the best products are the result of innovation in creative thinking and design. That this process is dynamic, not fixed by a static set of design stages, but flexible to the needs of the user/viewer.  In teaching, we must reflect this, but cannot offer unlimited creative freedoms in the classroom to students who are learning how to be creative.  We know that creative thinking is also the outcome of restriction, often flourishing despite tight budgets and limited resources. Equally, I believe it is essential to teach students how to design, not just provide the time, space, resources and guidance for making.  Perhaps we spend too long looking at artists and their products and not enough time considering their processes, where we might gain a greater insight into the thinking that informed their creative actions. 

How also do we encompass within our concept of art and design, the rapid prevalence of digital media and multi-modal products e.g. web and game design, animation, advertising and film (lens and screen based media)? I believe their place in our curriculum expands the concept of design, broadens skills and understanding, increasing the social and cultural relevance of this curriculum. It would be very easy to place this within a box labelled ‘engage and motivate the underperforming boys’, but this is not always true and the ‘ghettoisation’ of digital media for this purpose would be morally wrong.  However, I do think we broadly understand why digital media holds the attraction it does for many students, but all teachers must be fully prepared to embrace the scope of this media, using it to implement approaches that make visual language more relevant to all students. In particular, I believe it may help us to address the awful disparity in performance between girls and boys in art and design examinations, providing at least one strand in our strategy to tackle this.  These students will underperform for a variety of reasons, but what seems clear is their disinterest in a largely historical curriculum, which fuels their disengagement and poor motivation.  However, many of them are both technically skilled in aspects of digital media and hugely engaged as consumers of contemporary creative outcomes. This media is after all, a product of our time and our culture, speaking to us all through film, the TV screen, web, computer and increasingly through our phones and portable devices.

When considering how as educators we might better utilise these digital tools, we must remember it is unlike any other creative medium.  It encompasses a huge and growing range of processes and creative tools, with the means of both presentation and distribution.  It also provides us with a means of connecting with the work of the present, the past and of other groups and cultures.  It also has the potential to be interactive and will become increasingly ‘intelligent’, speaking to us directly in our leisure activities, as a learner or as part of an entertainment process.  This environment is complex, but it is certainly creative, highly visual and multi sensory. The games design industry models this for us and demonstrates how successful we can be in establishing new design industries and achieve commercial success.  It also connects art and design with other subjects such as physics and mathematics, as the routes into design in higher education become increasingly complex, mirroring the breadth of employment opportunity across the growing design, creative and media industries. We will always need artists who can help us interpret and understand our own society.  However, we really do need good designers who are highly skilled, innovative, creative, ethical, humorous, intelligent, political, social and morally minded.

As educators, we will personally be challenged by the demands of updating our digital and creative skills, moving many of us well beyond the focus of our original training and practice. Inevitably this will start to transform our departments and over time, we may well see a shift from paint and physical media towards lens and light based media.  By rooting ourselves more thoughtfully in the breadth of contemporary design practice, we can better achieve this evolution, connecting to a wealth of contemporary creative design practitioners, design companies and referencing the ways in which this practice connects with people as consumers.

I believe these approaches will also help us aspire to better design, to embrace the risks and problems of 21^st century design rather than remain always within the worlds of pictures and pigment. Too rarely do lessons fully explore and develop the thinking steps and process stages taken by an artist, digital games, product or media designer, supported by a critique of their research and their design studies.  Too often learning is about art and not about design, with insufficient focus on the thinking processes, context and purpose, engaging only with the physical outcomes and without value judgement, or a consideration of the relevance to society.

We know our world has become ‘visual’, where the image is almost more dominant than the word.  All the more surprising that so many teachers do not embrace the visual language of lens and light based media, the rich and diverse world of design that underpins this.  We know this media often uses a different skill set, requires an additional CPD commitment and certainly lacks many of the tactile and multi-sensory features that originally engaged us all as creators. However, it is evolving and it is essential that we educate young people as both critical creators and critical consumers, aspiring to the highest standards of design.

Perhaps we think that the process of design has been commandeered by Design Technology departments, or more industrial and functional iterations of commercial products, rather than the creation of a unique or bespoke outcome. We also tend to use the word ‘create’ more than the word ‘design’, perhaps because we think creation is more expressive or is a ‘higher order’ activity than designing? If so, we miss the point of what design is and what it can be.  Most importantly, we loose the potential to learn about and through the diverse processes across the many areas of design. We also loose some elements of a reflection on how the artist as designer, both physically and intellectually interprets our world. 

A question for teachers of art and design is whether ‘it is time’ to re-claim and expand our concept of the design process and in particular the contemporary design process?  If we don’t, we deny our students the opportunity to learn how to think as an artist and a designer, to learn how to visually perceive, ‘read’ and ‘apply’ this thinking using the visual language of our subject, thereby understanding how this language extends beyond 'art' into every aspect of our lives.

Ged Gast  -  September 2011